Abeg Use Abeg: The Future of Payments For The Boli Seller.

If you are not Nigerian and are not used to our lingua franca, the words “Abeg” and “Boli” might seem strange. The former actually means “to beg” and the latter means “grilled or roasted plantain”.

In Nigeria, “Abeg” can be an intense and jovial way of begging for something and what is mostly begged for is money. If you also lived or currently live in Nigeria, you would find out that the word; “Abeg” is used a lot.

One of the most interesting products created and launched in 2020 is Abeg. The idea was simple really, Nigerians needed an efficient and cool way to say “Abeg” and in turn, Nigerians also needed another cool way to act on the “Abeg”. I must tell you, that Abeg is actually really cool(I go to the website sometimes just to immerse myself in the product. It’s just beautiful!).

So what does Abeg have to do with a “Bole” seller, if you remember from before “Bole” means grilled or roasted plantain, the truth is that the header was more of an analogy of what I’d like Abeg to be used for.

I’ll tell a little story; I went to a store and needed to get something, my UBA card and App didn’t work (it was a Monday), I tried USSD and it worked but a few minutes later, It was sent back to my account. I was with a friend and he asked me to ask the store cashier if they used Abeg, I had heard of Abeg before but never actually used them, they seemed like an instrument for Twitter giveaways until that day. Long story short, the cashier had an Abeg account and we sent the money with no issues at all.

This event then struck me on how important it would for us to foster social commerce with peer-to-peer products and wallets.

The Analogy Of The Boli Seller:

In Nigeria, during the plantain season, we eat a lot of grilled plantain(it’s the ripe mushy type for me with spicy stew), it is something that is sold at every market and street corner. Boli in this case is less about the plantain and more about the nature of social commerce.

Social Commerce can basically be described as a commercial activity conducted on social media or via digital social interactions. Social commerce however has some roots in the way we go about buying things physically especially things like Bole, we basically usually have a seller we trust and patronize from time to time, as we grow in the relationship, we enjoy discounts from our seller and we are soon able to buy Bole now and pay later. This whole process rounds up how peer-to-peer payments will work in very random and common daily transactions.

Using Abeg to facilitate digital payments would make the process seamless and more trustworthy. Trust because Abeg is a social wallet and people are able to directly make demands from their peers. With Abeg businesses can boost customer relations. Apart from trust, there lies a significant market opportunity in the social payments space as e-commerce is expected to generate about $75 Billion in Nigeria (ITA) and since Nigerians predominantly buy from who they trust we expect that social commerce would contribute more than 14% of ecommerce figures as it currently does in the united states.

Going further I’d be recommending several strategies that I believe would help Abeg be the enabler of social commerce in Africa.

My Advice:

ABEG INTEGRATES WITH EXISTING SOCIAL COMMERCE PLATFORMS:

It would be great to have Abeg has a payment option on Buyfood. The product Buyfood makes it very easy to access any food vendor via a link on social media and pay for their services whilst waiting to get it delivered. Having Abeg has a payment option would make it easier for existing customers to easily purchase or gift food to anyone in their circle or anyone they want. Another example would be having Abeg as a payment option on the Twitter tip jar. It would make perfect sense for Abeg to be the leading provider because people already Abeg for things like that it would only make sense to have them as a payment option for Tip jar in Nigeria. The goal here would be to make Abeg available on every business website or payment page for seamless transactions via APIs or Plugins.

ABEG PROVIDES SMALL BUSINESS WITH MONEY ANALYTICS:

Businesses still aren’t able to make sense of financial data and that is because we have not had a lot of financial solutions being keen on making financial data super easy to understand. With Abeg seeing data on inflows, outflows, and milestones on a business wallet’s homepage would easily communicate the rate of business efficiency to every business using Abeg. The goal here would be to make Abeg more than a payment option for businesses but it would also make them a business tool.

ABEG SERVES A LOYALTY REWARD PRODUCT:

The soul of social commerce is trust and what drives it even further is customer loyalty. It would be great to have Abeg provide features that help businesses reward their most faithful customers and even help them see their most inactive customers and help them follow up with them. The loyalty reward could be to give special discounts to special customers. The goal is for Businesses to encourage their customers to use Abeg to pay for their goods/services so they can partake in their loyalty reward programs.

ABEG SERVES THE DAY TO DAY BUSINESS:

I would really like to live in a world where the guy I buy clothes from and the dude I order Shawarma from use Abeg wallets. I have seen Abeg work and actually seen how it has saved both I and the business time. Abeg owes it to all business owners to make such awesomeness available to anyone who needs it even though they might not know it exists yet.

Conclusion:

In my opinion, Abeg does not need to be the new payment gateway, it should serve as more. A business management tool that ensures trust in social commerce. The ultimate goal for this spotlight series to recommend ways that Abeg can expand a $12 billion industry and not just a way for it to get market share. Social Commerce and generally e-commerce has hit surface level in Africa and by the time we would start adjusting our culture of buying boli online to fit the digital space, any product that serves us best would have all our money. Literally!