Black November for over 300 Konga staff as they receive termination letters

Konga, one of the leading eCommerce companies in Nigeria has sacked over 300 members of staff. Most of these people received their sack letters yesterday, 30th of November.

The news was first reported by Quartz Africa and verified independently from some of the affected staff.

A medium post by the CEO, Shola Adekoya, shows that this is a result of the internal restructuring carried out by the eCommerce company to align its operations with a prepay only model and its intention to stop warehousing activities.

In his post titled “Konga Transitioning to Prepay only”, he said

In mid-November, Konga.com made a bold step and became a prepay only platform. In recent years, we have explored several solutions for payment and e-commerce in Nigeria and concluded that prepay is a necessary approach for our business and the market.

Given the cost of inflation and increasing challenges of managing payment-on-delivery, as well as the resulting level of order cancellations on the platform, we had to take this decision. We will continue to review other ways to provide payment-on-delivery to customers, but for the time being, we are prepay only. We have enabled a contact seller button that allows open communication between and seller and buyer in cases where pay on delivery transactions still need to be carried out directly between the seller and the buyer.

This decision means that we can run a more efficient business and focus our energies on orders that we are sure customers want. It also means that our operating costs will be lower, putting us on a better track where we can solve deeper issues that paying customers face on the platform.

In line with this new approach, today we announced an internal restructuring to align our operations with a prepay only model and our intention to stop warehousing activities. Unfortunately, this resulted in a headcount reduction. Letting go of colleagues and friends is not an easy decision, but one that naturally stems from these changes. With the support of our investors, those impacted will be duly compensated.

Our Customers, Merchants and Franchisees should expect to see an improvement in service quality, which continues to be the core of our business approach and we are now better shaped to look into other issues other than cash handling.

Shola says that the company has seen a strong shift toward online payment and expects to share insights later.