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Online Gift Card Retailer Gains Popularity in Nigeria

Online Gift Card Retailer Gains Popularity in Nigeria

It is usually a common practice for gift receivers to dislike some gifts – sometimes all, forcing them to be abandoned or given away. SureGifts.com.ng is the first gift card company in Nigeria. According to co-founder Adeoye Ojo, the process involved in using the platform is straightforward – a customer visits the website, browses through available merchants and decides the value of a gift card to purchase.

It is added to the cart, method of delivery is selected and other details are provided, including payment. This is the latest option that people giving gifts now have to ensure that the recipients get what they really want.

Ojo told AFKInsider that he and the other SureGifts co-founders — who were at that time co-workers at JUMIA Nigeria, one of the two major e-commerce platforms in the country, noticed behaviors that suggested gifting.

Latching Onto Trends

[Olaoluwa Samuel-Biyi], [Babafemi Femi] and I worked a lot with data when we were at JUMIA and noticed a pattern in customer behavior that tended towards gifting such as men buying lots of female items and women buying male items etc. [We] figured we should create a service focused on gifting,” Ojo explained.

“But instead of having merchandise on display, we decided it’s best to partner with various merchants and sell their gift cards there by making the gifting process richer for the sender and the recipient, and that was what led to SureGifts.”

A gift card is a restricted monetary equivalent that is issued by retailers as a non-monetary gift. Gift cards are very popular in developed countries. In the U.S., close to two-thirds of all consumers have a least bought one gift card, according to Gift Card Granny. By 2006, over 80 percent of retailers in Canada had embraced gift cards.

Still, when the co-founders decided to launch their platform, gift cards were still a strange concept in Nigeria. Ojo said they decided to go ahead with the launch anyway because they were convinced that the market was ready for the service.

“We knew we could make it happen,” Ojo said.

He said the level of acceptance is growing as most customers refer friends and families to use SureGifts.

“Several companies now prefer using SureGifts to power staff rewards and we are working hard to improve popularity so that more Nigerians can know about the service — so gifting can be simpler but richer for them,” he said.

Connecting Gift Givers

SureGifts currently retails gift cards for brands and merchants in Nigeria. The platform offers Gift Specialist Service and recently launched Gift Registry which is ideal for several occasions such as weddings, birthdays and house warmings.