Op-ed

Instagram, Mobile Money and a Boda: Tanzania’s E-Commerce Economy

A lot of our online shopping happens on social media. Instagram is full of Tanzanian businesses selling clothes, shoes, beauty products, furniture, electronics, food and almost anything else you can think of.

Husnah Mad-hy

September 4, 2026

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In a Western country like Canada, shopping online is relatively standardised. You might buy something on Amazon, where you choose your product, enter your address, pay by card and select your delivery speed.

You might shop directly from a retailer’s website, with much the same process and the option of home delivery or in-store pickup. Increasingly, you might also discover something through Instagram, TikTok or Facebook Marketplace, but even then, you are usually directed to a formal checkout page.

Behind that transaction is an entire infrastructure. Your payment is processed, the retailer’s system updates its inventory, a warehouse receives the order, and an established courier network — UPS, DHL, Canada Post — eventually brings the product to your door.

Tanzania doesn’t have Amazon. And for the most part, we do not shop by going directly to retailers’ websites. But we do have an e-commerce system.

The process is different.

You see something you like on Instagram. You screenshot it and send it to the seller via DMs, or click the link in their bio that takes you to a WhatsApp Business chat. You ask whether it is available, perhaps ask for the price, colour or size, and place your order.

You pay with no bank card involved. The seller sends you a number or QR code. Through Mixx by Yas, M-Pesa, Airtel Money, a banking app or another mobile payment service, you make the payment and send the seller proof.

Then comes the delivery. The store gives your number to a boda rider, who calls you and asks where you are. The delivery price depends on your location. Sometimes, within two or three hours of first seeing the product on Instagram, it is in your hands.

Whether what arrives looks quite as good as it did on Instagram is another question. But often, the transaction itself works.

Cross-border solutions

There is even a cross-border version of this economy. Tanzanians and Kenyans buy from businesses in each other’s countries, with clothes and other goods sometimes sent across the border on buses and collected on the other side by the next day.

I have personally bought products from a social media page in Mombasa, Kenya, which was introduced to me by a friend. I paid via M-Pesa, and the seller packaged my order and put it on a bus to Tanzania. She then sent me the bus parcel reference number and, by midday the next day, my parcel had arrived in Dar es Salaam.

I sent a boda to the bus agents, who collected it and brought it straight to my house. I never had to leave.

I know this happens the other way around too. I know people selling products from Tanzania to Kenya, and Kenyan friends are always talking about stores from Tanzania.

Our bus companies between Tanzania and Kenya aren’t just moving passengers; they form part of the cross-border parcel network. We do not necessarily use an international courier company to receive cross-border products.

Again, the infrastructure already existed. The bus was travelling between the two countries anyway. The boda was already moving around Dar es Salaam. Mobile money and social media connected the buyer and seller.

Put those pieces together, and a product advertised by a small seller on social media can cross an international border and arrive at a customer’s doorstep the following day.

From the outside, Tanzania’s system can look informal and fragmented. But it is also remarkably functional. Instagram — or whatever social media platform — is the storefront. Instagram or WhatsApp becomes the sales desk. Mobile money is the payment infrastructure. Thousands of boda riders form a decentralised last-mile logistics network.

Nobody necessarily designed these pieces to constitute an e-commerce system. Yet together, that is exactly what they have become.

Trust looks different too

In Canada, a platform like Amazon or a retailer website like Sephora creates much of the trust required for a transaction. There are reviews, standardised checkout processes, tracking numbers, refund policies and, where necessary, chargebacks. Even how established, how good or how professional a website or platform looks affects whether we trust it.

Trust is much more institutionalised in Western countries. There, it’s less about the individual and more about the systems around the transaction: the payment provider, your bank, the courier. There are standardised mechanisms available for recourse if something goes wrong.

On Amazon, for example, you can report that an item never arrived, request a return or refund, select the reason for your complaint and track its resolution, all through the platform. You don’t need to message and convince the individual seller to fix the problem. (This, of course, has its issues too.)

In Tanzania, much of that trust is created differently.

Is the Instagram page legitimate? How long has it been operating? Does it have followers? Are there likes? Are there real comments? Have other people bought from it? Does the seller respond quickly? Has a friend used them before?

The platform itself may offer relatively little protection, but businesses build reputations through their pages, customers and social networks.

There’s a mutual dependence where businesses need their customers just as customers need to trust them. Their online store is their social media page, which is also their reputation.

If they mess around with a customer — refuse a refund, ignore a complaint or provide poor service — that customer can complain, comment, share screenshots, post and tag that store.

For a business built almost entirely through social media and word of mouth, reputation is an asset. A viral post can bring customers; a public complaint can drive them away.

Trust, then, might be less institutionalised, but it is not absent. It is built — and sometimes enforced — socially.

Logistics — speed

There is another important difference: labour and logistics.

A company like Amazon has spent enormous amounts of money building warehouses, fulfilment centres, software and delivery networks to make rapid delivery possible. They have delivery fleets, sophisticated inventory systems and enormous capital expenditure.

Of course, they’re a global company handling enormous amounts of deliveries — the scale, reliability and geographic reach are incomparable. For such a company, next-day delivery is impressive.

But in Dar es Salaam?

Boda calls: “Dada na mzigo wako, niulete wapi?”

You answer: “Nipo Upanga.”

“Sawa dada, delivery ni Sh5,000.”

An hour later: “Dada, niko nje.”

We cannot undersell just how fast and conveniently we get our goods. It might include a slightly longer call trying to explain exactly where you are if they don’t know how to use Location, but you get your product.

Dar es Salaam has something very different: thousands of motorcycles already moving through the city.

For a small online seller, this means there is no need to establish a delivery department or negotiate a national courier contract. Once an order is ready, a rider can collect it and take it directly to the customer. Services such as Bolt have made that network even easier to access.

For the customer, the result can be surprisingly convenient. Something ordered at midday might arrive before 3 p.m.

Barriers

Perhaps the most interesting part of this system is what it means for the person on the other side of the transaction.

Someone who wants to start selling clothes in Tanzania does not necessarily need to build a website, integrate an online card-payment system, rent a physical shop or establish a relationship with a courier company.

At its simplest, an online merchant needs stock, an Instagram account, WhatsApp, access to mobile money and a boda rider. That dramatically lowers the barrier to becoming a merchant.

Of course, informality comes with costs.

Customers may not have the same access to refunds or chargebacks. Delivery prices can vary. Consumer protections may be weaker or harder to enforce. Payment confirmation is sometimes manual.

Stock management can become difficult. Successful businesses can find themselves drowning in WhatsApp messages and Instagram DMs. As businesses grow, questions of accounting, taxation and formalisation become harder to avoid.

Yet in my experience, many online stores are remarkably responsive. Their reputation depends on it. A customer who has little formal recourse can still tell friends, comment publicly or simply never buy from that page again.

Finally …

The interesting question, then, is not why Tanzania has failed to reproduce Amazon or Western platforms.

It is what Tanzania’s e-commerce economy tells us about how digital transformation actually happens.

Tanzanians took the infrastructure available to them — social media, WhatsApp, mobile money, buses and bodas — and assembled their own system of digital commerce around it.

There is room to make it better. Mobile money could integrate more easily with social media stores, payment confirmations could be automatic so we don’t have to send screenshots, deliveries could be easier to track, and small online businesses could have better ways to reach customers.

But perhaps the point is to optimise the system we already have and build around it, rather than assume it needs to be replaced.

Because nobody really sat down and designed this system. Social Media became the storefront and sales desk. Mobile money became the payment gateway. Buses started moving our parcels across borders, and bodas took care of the last mile.

It might not look like the e-commerce economy we are used to seeing elsewhere.

But it is ours.

And from my experience?

It works.

Husnah Mad-hy is a lawyer and writer based in Tanzania. She can be reached at husnahmadhy@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.