E-Business
How e-Commerce Improves Health and Safety Of Informal Retailers
As Nigeria pushes towards a virile digital economy, the informal retail sector, with billions of dollars investment, holds a crucial role in attaining this goal.
However, a huge chunk of the market still operates the old-fashioned inventory model, and the rigour in this process of restocking takes a huge toll on them.
To understand the unique health and safety implications of stocking an informal retail store, it’s important to highlight processes which occur on a typical market day for informal retailers.
For a retailer in a city like Lagos, the struggle for transportation could be a bigger job than the shopping activities at the market. And after expending physical and mental energy in the hunt for the best stock prices at different distributor outlets, they are faced with the challenge of transporting the goods back to their retail stores. This usually comes with another load of trouble.
Majority of markets, especially in Lagos, attract exit fees. While trying to sort this out, a retailer is looking for a carrier to convey the goods to the bus stop, and in doing so, must also be as vigilant as possible to ensure a thief or market hoodlum is not approaching in the form of a “carrier’.
“Retailers have recounted their pain points caused from the drudgery of market visits and haggling to attribute to their status as regulars at health centres and pharmacies. For them, most of their medical issues pointed to immense stress in their daily life,” said Alerzo CEO, Adewale Opaleye.
The last three years have seen the rise of B2B e-commerce platforms like Alerzo, TradeDepot, Omnibiz and others springing up to bridge the online service gap for the informal retail market. Opaleye created Alerzo, after seeing the challenges his mother, an informal retailer, went through. He said Alerzo in the last two years is alleviating health and safety issues for retailers on the platform.
“70% of our retailers previously restocked 2-3 times a week while 14% restocked more than 4 times per week. The market trips, as expounded, reasonably attributes to emotional, mental and physical strain.
“Digging deeper into their stressors, our findings show a combination of fatigue associated with the rigours of stocking their shops and taking care of their growing families,” he said.
With their activities, B2B platforms are eliminating the need for retailers to make frequent trips to central markets; the need to haggle incessantly; the need to pay fees to carriers and market authorities, and the need to foot transportation bills (within N500 to over N5,000).
Currently, the market is dominated by the tedious visit to the physical market. Bringing these informal retailers to the online shipping platform will no doubt go a long way in the drive for a robust digital economy and also be a major boost to the economy of the country. And e-commerce platforms appear ready to be the required connector and facilitator for thousands of retailers still outside the digital net.
Kaspersky has identified an advanced phishing campaign targeting employees with personalised emails and attached documents disguised as HR policy updates.
This campaign marks a significant escalation in phishing tactics, with attackers tailoring not only the email body, but also the attachments by addressing individual recipients, showcasing an unprecedented level of customisation. The goal was to lure the victim into entering their corporate email credentials.
The attackers likely prepared by parsing employee names to make the campaign targeted and more convincing.
The emails feature a deceptive body: a fraudulent “verified sender” badge to build trust, the recipient’s name, and an invitation to open the attached file to review remote work protocols, benefits administration and security standards. However, the whole email body is in reality just an image with no real text in it; this is done to bypass email filters.
The attached document, posing as an updated “Employee Handbook,” does not contain any actual guidelines – only a title page, a table of contents with the items that have supposedly been changed highlighted in red, a page with a QR code, supposedly for going to the full document and common instructions on how to read QR codes using a phone. The document features the victim’s name multiple times to convince that this document was created specifically for them.
If the victim scans the QR code and follows the link, they land on a fraudulent page where they are asked to enter their corporate credentials, which is what the attackers are hunting for.
“This campaign demonstrates a new level of sophistication in phishing attacks, and we may be seeing a new mailing automation mechanism that generates a separate attached document and a separate image for the email body for each recipient.
“This tactic allows to scale the attack and at the same time possibly evade traditional defenses. Organisations must prioritise advanced security measures and employee education to stay ahead of these threats,” comments Roman Dedenok, Anti-Spam Expert at Kaspersky.
Temu, the global online marketplace, has joined the International Trademark Association (INTA) as a corporate member and serves on its Anti-Counterfeiting Committee.
INTA is a global association that brings together more than 6,700 organizations, representing over 37,000 trademark professionals and brand owners across 181 countries. By joining INTA, Temu deepens its commitment to building a trusted online marketplace and advancing global IP protection through broader, cross-industry collaboration.
“INTA welcomes TEMU’s willingness to engage in anticounterfeiting initiatives, including in the Association’s annual Anticounterfeiting Workshop and Online Takedown Certificate Program which serve to share best practices and connect stakeholders,” said Alastair Gray, Director of Anti-Counterfeiting, INTA. “Constructive collaboration with these efforts can contribute to the protection of intellectual property rights for INTA members and support the removal of counterfeit products from the platform which ultimately protects consumers.”
At the 2025 INTA Annual Meeting held in San Diego in May, Temu participated in the Anti-Counterfeiting Committee Roundtable, serving as a moderator to facilitate discussions among brand owners, online platforms, and government officials on emerging technologies, best practices for collaboration, and strategies to strengthen global anti-counterfeiting efforts.
“Joining INTA and serving on its Anti-Counterfeiting Committee reflects Temu’s ongoing commitment to ensuring a trustworthy online shopping experience,” said a Temu spokesperson. “We value collaboration with industry peers and stakeholders and are dedicated to advancing collective efforts in intellectual property protection.”
Temu also participates in INTA-led online workshops, including the Online Platform Notice and Takedown Certification Program, which outlines the latest procedures and best practices used by e-commerce platforms and social media companies. These workshops aim to enhance the quality and accuracy of rights-holder notices, promoting more effective takedown processes and content moderation.
Since launching in 2022, Temu has made significant investments in IP enforcement. Its measures include comprehensive seller vetting and compliance training, 24/7 algorithmic monitoring with manual review, a dedicated IP protection portal and brand registry to streamline takedown submissions, and an internal enforcement team that handles claims with speed and accuracy.
China’s Huawei Technologies unveiled an AI computing system on Saturday that an industry expert said rivals Nvidia’s most advanced product, as the company aims to expand its footprint in the country’s booming AI sector.
The CloudMatrix 384 system made its public debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a three-day event in Shanghai, attracting a large crowd to Huawei’s booth with its showcase of cutting-edge AI innovations.
The system has attracted significant interest from the global AI community since Huawei (HWT.UL) first introduced it in April. Industry analysts see it as a direct challenger to Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72, the most advanced system-level offering currently available from the U.S. chipmaker.
In an April article, Dylan Patel, founder of semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis, stated that Huawei now possesses AI system capabilities that could surpass those of Nvidia.
Huawei staff at its WAIC booth declined to comment when asked to introduce the CloudMatrix 384 system.
A spokesperson for Huawei did not respond to questions.
Huawei has become widely regarded as China’s most promising domestic supplier of chips essential for AI development, even though the company faces U.S. export restrictions.
Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang told Bloomberg in May that Huawei had been “moving quite fast” and named the CloudMatrix as an example.
The CloudMatrix 384 system features 384 of Huawei’s latest 910C chips and, according to SemiAnalysis, surpasses Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 in certain performance metrics, despite the latter using 72 B200 chips.
SemiAnalysis attributes this performance advantage to Huawei’s strong system design, which offsets the lower power of individual chips by leveraging a greater number of them and incorporating system-level innovations.
Huawei describes the system as utilizing a “supernode” architecture that enables ultra-high-speed interconnectivity between chips.
In June, Zhang Pingan, CEO, Huawei Cloud confirmed that the CloudMatrix 384 was already operational on Huawei’s cloud platform.
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