Unlocking the Power of Personalisation

As Jumia works to connect sellers to consumers thoughtfully, two important trends continue to impact our mission. First, the astounding array of choices in today’s online marketplace is a compelling advantage as compared to traditional physical retail, yet the space has never been more crowded. Indeed, the amount of choice can be overwhelming for consumers and a well-designed marketplace is critical to a positive customer experience. Secondly, during the pandemic, we saw a surge in time spent browsing mobile shopping apps, which resulted in more online transactions.

With these trends in mind, we asked our team to consider how Jumia can help to ensure that consumers enjoy a streamlined approach and spend more time actually purchasing what they need. The answer is a smart strategy fueled with the right data that helps shoppers overcome decision fatigue and enables sellers to be in the right place at the right time to add value for consumers.

As an established e-commerce platform, we receive millions of visitors to our website. Their activity generates valuable data from which we can draw insights once we’ve applied machine learning and other big data processing techniques.

Applying segmentation

After many years of understanding consumer behavior, the amount of information to process to optimise the consumer experience continues to present a technological challenge.

The first step to achieve this is a monumental investment in data discovery. With this, we are able to manage and prepare data, partition it, and with the help of big data make sure we have the capacity to scale and be as efficient as possible to make data consistently available. To protect consumer information and privacy, it is important to take into consideration data anonymisation ensuring that Jumia meets our customers’ expectations about data privacy and security.

The next step is to make sure we can easily use the segments created. For that, we built new systems that allow consumers to use, or fine-tune segmented audiences on all the communication channels that we have established and make sure that the consumer experience on our platforms is as personalised as possible.

With this approach, we are able to segment our audience according to various criteria, including categories of popular products, price ranges for typical items purchased, location, a device used, etc. Our team can then utilise these segments for different innovations that yield benefits on both the consumer and seller sides.

Added to this, we are conducting an experiment to allow us to provide not only a more targeted experience but also a more focused communication platform that is less intrusive to the consumer. This will allow our team the opportunity to learn and improve in the future.

Optimising our channels by using segmentation not only improves the consumer experience but also enables our sellers to target their products to prospective consumers. It optimises the investment in advertising by ensuring that we target the right consumers by considering their behavior and demonstrated interests.

We are also creating homepages tailored to a particular shopper’s interests. Once the personalised homepages are created, we will be able to display ads related to specific products that a shopper browses and purchases.

**********************************

Hélder Ferreira

Chief Product Officer at Jumia

Helder is an experienced Product Owner with a demonstrated history of working in the internet industry. Hélder is skilled in Product Lifecycle Management, User Experience, Agile Methodologies, Product Strategy, and ALM. He has a degree in in Mathematics & Computer Science from Universidade do Minho.