Why Video Commerce Will Be the Default Way Africans Shop Online by 2028
In 2019, if you wanted to buy a laptop in Lagos, you had two realistic options: go to Computer Village and negotiate in person, or buy from Jumia with product photos that may or may not reflect reality. The first option required a trip across the city. The second required faith.
By 2028, neither of those will be the dominant option. Video commerce — where buyers discover, evaluate, and purchase products through short-form video — will be the default. This isn't a prediction. It's a curve that's already steep and accelerating.
Why photos never worked well in Nigeria
Product photography works in markets where buyers trust the system enough to accept a degree of uncertainty. In markets with high fraud history, low trust in online sellers, and significant product-photo manipulation, photos create a specific problem: they look like what they're not.
Nigerian online shoppers have been burned by photos of iPhones that turned out to be knock-offs, clothing that was a completely different shade than shown, and "brand new" items that were clearly refurbished. The trust deficit is not irrational — it's earned through experience.
Video is harder to fake. A 60-second product video showing an item from multiple angles, demonstrating its functions, and held by an actual human being is not impossible to fake, but it's expensive to do at scale. The marginal cost of photo manipulation is near zero. The marginal cost of video deception is high enough that most fraudsters don't bother.
The phone penetration factor
Africa has the fastest-growing smartphone market in the world. Nigeria alone added over 8 million new smartphone users in 2025. These are not buyers migrating from desktops — these are buyers whose entire internet experience is mobile-first and video-native.
A 22-year-old in Kaduna who got their first smartphone in 2024 has never used a desktop e-commerce site. Their shopping mental model was formed by TikTok and Instagram Reels. They expect to discover products through video. Static product pages feel old to them in a way that's almost visceral.
What's different about Africa versus Asia's video commerce wave
China's video commerce boom (Douyin, Taobao Live) was built on top of an already-functional logistics and payments infrastructure. Africa is building video commerce and infrastructure simultaneously, which creates both challenges and a leapfrog opportunity.
Because there's no legacy system to defend, African video commerce can be natively designed for trust problems — escrow by default, video as primary proof, dispute resolution built into the purchase flow — rather than bolted on afterwards. Luuk is an example of this. It wasn't a photo marketplace that added video. It was designed from day one around video as the fundamental unit of commerce.
The negotiation layer
One thing that Western and Asian video commerce misses entirely: in West African markets, negotiation is cultural commerce infrastructure. Fixed prices feel aggressive. The ability to make an offer, counter, and reach an agreed price is not just a preference — it's how trust is built in a transaction.
Video commerce platforms that don't include negotiation will always feel slightly foreign to the Nigerian buyer. The ones that do will feel like home.
"We didn't add negotiation because it seemed like a nice feature. We added it because removing it would have been like removing the market itself." — Luuk founding team
What 2028 looks like
By 2028, the research suggests video commerce will account for over 40% of all Nigerian e-commerce transactions by value. The category leaders will be fashion, electronics, and food — the same categories that dominate street markets, because those are the categories where seeing before buying matters most.
Sellers who build video-first brands today are building the distribution infrastructure of 2028. Every follower, every review, every piece of video content is a compounding asset. The window to build that asset while the market is still forming is finite. It's also very much still open.