How to sell imported goods in Nigeria after they land
Four ways to sell imported goods in Nigeria once the container clears: your own shop, market wholesale, appointed distributors, or online. What each one costs you.
Almost every Nigerian who imports plans the buying in detail and the selling not at all. The supplier is checked, the freight is quoted, the duty is estimated, and then the container clears Apapa and the goods sit in a room in Lagos while the owner works out who is actually going to buy them. This page is about the part nobody plans. There are four ways to sell imported goods in Nigeria, they suit very different quantities, and the one you choose decides how fast you get your money back and how much of it you lose.
The chain is longer than you think #
The best measurement of how goods actually move through Nigeria comes from a survey of 595 Lagos traders published by Grant and Startz as NBER Working Paper 30109 in June 2022. Three findings from it are worth memorising.
The median trader in that survey had been trading nine years, had one shop and one employee, and bought about 60,000 dollars of stock a year. That is the person you are selling to, not a company with a buying department.
Nigerian consumers are reached through chains averaging 4.23 links, roughly 1.6 steps above the Lagos trader and 1.6 steps below. So between the factory in Guangdong and the woman who buys one carton, there are usually four hands, each taking a margin.
And 87 per cent of importers also wholesale, with 54 per cent of all traders' sales being wholesale rather than retail. This is the important one. In Nigeria, importing and wholesaling are the same job. If you import and then try to retail only, you are doing half a business and carrying all of the risk.
Route one: your own shop or stall #
You take a shop, you retail at retail prices, you keep the whole margin. The catch is speed. A single shop moves single units, and a container does not empty at single unit speed, so your money stays in the stock for months while the exchange rate moves against your next order.
It also costs more than people expect. The published shop prices at the remodelled A Line of Ariaria International Market in Aba were 20,000 naira for the expression of interest form, 5 million naira for existing traders and 6 million naira for new ones, reported by Hallmark, though that report carries no confirmed publication date so treat the figures as indicative. Governor Otti separately spoke of remodelled shops at around 10 million naira with bank loans arranged for traders who could not pay outright.
Own shop suits you if you are importing small quantities of something with a fat retail margin and you already have a location. It does not suit a container.
Route two: sell wholesale into a market #
This is what most Nigerian importers actually do. You break the container into cartons and sell them to traders in Onitsha, Aba, Kano, Alaba, Trade Fair or Balogun, who then sell on. You get your money back quickly, often within weeks, and you give away most of the margin doing it.
The markets are not interchangeable. Onitsha merchants import from China and Dubai and then supply wholesalers in Lagos, Kano and Abuja, so Onitsha is a distribution point rather than an end market. Kantin Kwari in Kano sells to buyers from Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Ghana and the wider Sahel. Alaba International sells electronics to Ghana, Togo, Benin and East Africa. Ariaria in Aba both makes shoes and resells imported ones. We have written each of these up separately: Onitsha Main Market, Ariaria in Aba, Kantin Kwari in Kano and the Lagos markets.
Route three: appoint distributors #
Instead of selling to whoever walks past, you appoint people to sell your goods in defined places on defined terms. This is the model the US Commercial Service describes as the standard way into the Nigerian market, and it is how the large manufacturers reach the country.
It is also where importers lose the most money, because a distributor who takes goods and disappears has taken your entire margin and your capital with it. What you can and cannot put in the agreement is governed by the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018, and the rules on exclusive territories and fixing the resale price are not what most people assume. That is a page of its own: appointing distributors in Nigeria.
Route four: sell it online #
Jumia, Konga, Instagram, WhatsApp and TikTok. Lower volume than a market, higher margin per unit, and an entirely different set of costs: commission, returns, delivery and the customers who refuse the parcel at the door. See selling imported goods online in Nigeria.
Which route should I use for my first container? #
Split it. Do not commit a whole container to one route on your first go, because you do not yet know which of your products moves.
A practical first split is to wholesale about two thirds of the quantity into a market quickly, at a price you would be content with, to get your capital back and fund the next order. Retail or sell online the rest, slowly, at the real retail price, and watch which items go first. That tells you what to buy more of next time, which is information you cannot get any other way and which is worth more than the extra margin you gave away.
The one thing not to do is sit on the whole container waiting for the retail price. Nigerian importers who do that discover that the naira moved, the season passed, or three other people landed the same goods from the same 1688 seller.
Before the goods land, fix three things #
Where it will sit. A container discharged with nowhere to go goes into demurrage, and demurrage has emptied more importers than bad products.
Who you are selling to, by name. Not a market, a person. Go to the market before the goods arrive, show samples or photographs, and get a price indication. If nobody in the market will quote you a price on a photograph, that is your answer and it arrived before you spent the money.
What you will accept on credit, and from whom. Trade credit downstream is normal and documented in Nigerian markets, and it is also how importers lose everything in one go. Decide your rule before somebody is standing in front of you asking for goods on trust. Selling on credit in Nigeria covers it.
One more thing that belongs here rather than in a footnote. The single largest documented loss event for Nigerian market traders is not theft or a bad customer, it is fire, and the traders quoted after almost every one of them had no insurance. The Great Nigeria Insurance building on Lagos Island burned on Christmas Eve 2025 with over 5 billion naira of goods inside and more than thirty shipping containers destroyed at one cargo company alone, per BusinessDay's investigation. Where your goods sleep matters as much as who buys them.
What decides the margin you keep #
Whichever of the four routes you take to sell imported goods in Nigeria, the arithmetic is the same and it is unforgiving. Work out the landed cost per unit first, then the price the market will really pay, then see what is left. Profit margin on imported goods does that arithmetic properly, and pricing imported goods in Nigeria covers what to do when the naira moves while your stock is still on the shelf.
Sources: Grant and Startz, NBER Working Paper 30109, June 2022. Startz, VoxDev, 31 July 2017. US Commercial Service, Nigeria Distribution and Sales Channels. Hallmark, remodelled Ariaria shop allocation, publication date unconfirmed. BusinessDay, Christmas Eve blaze investigation, event 24 December 2025.
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