Entering Ethiopia means navigating infrastructure that is still being built — by state partners who are also potential competitors. That is not in any global playbook.
A few days before Wildberries, the largest e-commerce marketplace in the Russian-speaking world, held its first information session in Addis Ababa, I bought a pair of headphones online. The purchase is worth recounting because of the process.
An influencer’s ad caught my attention. I checked the seller’s Instagram page, then moved to Telegram to place the order. A response came, eventually. I compared prices, asked questions, and made a decision. From there, the transaction moved offline. A phone call to confirm. A deposit sent separately to the seller’s TeleBirr account. Another exchange to arrange delivery. When the driver arrived, we spent several minutes finding each other, navigating by landmarks rather than addresses.
The headphones arrived days later. The transaction was informal and entirely unremarkable. This is how online commerce works in Ethiopia’s capital and it points directly to what any platform entering this market will need to solve.
The front end is digital. Everything behind it is still mainly analog.
On April 15th, Wildberries, processing over 25 million orders daily in 11 countries worldwide, announced its entry into Ethiopia. Within nearly half a year after signing an MoU with the Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the platform had opened to local sellers. The rollout begins with outbound trade. Ethiopian sellers in coffee, textiles, and consumer goods are gaining access to international markets before the domestic market opens in turn.
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