Juliet Anammah, former CEO and now chairwoman of Jumia Nigeria and chief sustainability officer of Jumia Group, Africa's first "unicorn," said that the e-commerce market in African countries remains largely untapped, accounting for about 2-5% of the total retail.

The current number of active users of Jumia, Africa's largest e-commerce platform, is only 7 million, thus indicating a huge market gap yet to be explored on the continent.

At the same time, more and more tech companies are entering the African market, opening up new opportunities in e-commerce. Between 2014 and 2018 alone, the number of online shoppers on the African continent has increased at an average growth rate of 18% annually, higher than the global average of 12%. Statista estimates that the number of online shoppers in Africa was 281 million in 2020 and will grow to 520 million by 2025.

Today, online sales account for 18% of global retail sales and could rise to 21.8% by 2024.

At the end of the first half of 2021 the share of online sales in Russia was 8.5%. The Ministry of Industry and Trade predicts that there will be an increase of 15% in the next few years.

In some countries, online commerce is already catching up with traditional retailers. According to a forecast by eMarketer, the volume of online sales in China in 2022 will exceed the volume of sales of offline retail (50.3% vs. 49.7%).