Jumia Nigeria has announced the introduction of Nigeria’s first e-commerce Bot named Jumia Bot. The Bot can assist users search for items, make hotel reservations, order food with just a simple conversation.
Jumia Bot is hosted on Facebook messenger and powered by Facebook’s artificial intelligence, this implies that millions of Nigerians can now shop for items directly from the Facebook messenger environment with the assistance of the Jumia Bot.
Over the years, Jumia has claimed it is not just an e-commerce platform but a full blown technology company. “Technology is the heartbeat of what we do at Jumia”, says Juliet Anammah, CEO Jumia Nigeria hence the introduction of Jumia Bot as a core technology integration to its business. “Jumia Bot has a very simple yet important objective: to help our customers get to personalized deals on Jumia Nigeria” she further stated.
Jumia Bot is a shopping assistant backed up by a lot of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. It works by asking customers what they are looking for, then use their answers to uncover best offers that are relevant, similar to search results after typing in a search query on e-commerce websites. . For example, to get access to the best hotel and airfare deals on Facebook Messenger, a user can simply provide his or her preferred date and destination to the bot in order to see the top recommendations.
When making another order, Jumia Bot uses research to make personalized recommendations for the user, the AI and machine learning technology learns from users based on preference over a period of time.
The shopper’s post-order experience is also integrated into Jumia Bot. As a result, shoppers can track their orders and contact the Customer Service team for follow-up questions.
Currently the natural language processing works well as it is just familiar with shopping keywords and keywords related to items listed on the website. However, it will be able to improve upon users query over time.
One thing the Bot still lacks is the lack of in-chat purchasing. After an item is selected, the Jumia website is opened on the in-app browser, keeping every activity within the messenger environment. One can now proceed to checkout by entering Jumia login details and making payment via Jumia Pay, Jumia’s secure online payment option which is said to have accounted for about 20% of all prepaid orders on Jumia within the last 10 months.