This is a very informative discussion for sellers who sell on platforms like jumia,konga and the likes.

So as a seller who is registered on these platforms, you get notifications that a discount period is coming up which could be inform of flash sales, black Friday, clearance sales and the likes. And your asked if you will like to join. How do you respond to this instances?

This is a topic up for discussion and am not trying to be biased or influence your decisions when these instances come up.

As for me I feel these platforms hardly care about you the seller whether you make any profit or not.

Most times they receive commissions as high as 20%. You the seller most times have to pay a monthly fee to put up your products for display. Such as the case of Konga. They have the subscription of 2500 or 1000 naira per month.

If you as a seller import your goods there will be a logistic fee. You then calculate your profit then add the platforms commission. Your also to pay 2500 subscription monthly. You do your maths and share these costs evenly amongst your products so as to meet up. Which your not even guaranteed of selling all to meet up before month ends.

You also calculate logistic cost to take items to distribution centres when you have an order.
You get to a distribution centre where you are to print out the order details at a cost and also purchase packaging items.

Not to mention the selling competition out there, which is more of a rat race. With each seller trying to be competitive by introducing a lower price than his competitor in order to get the customer to himself.
These factors translates to the seller trying to look for the cheapest price since buyers most times go for the cheaper price against quality. This in turn brings about a lot of counterfeit products being sold on these platforms by desperate sellers.
A seller already has to keep up with this.
Then these platforms periodically come up with these crazy discounts which your invited to enter. Yes its not mandatory. But if you don't enter the discounts as a seller, this will definitely affect your sales because people are trying to get value for their money. By buying at the lowest price possible for the same value.
Trust me I know this is frustrating for a seller.
Some of these discounts can go on for a month at a stretch.
And without even given sellers a break to recover from splitting there supposed income in less than a week after a discount ends they introduce another discount session which goes on for another stretch period.
Most times these platforms commission doesn't reduce or even stop because of the discount trend.
Then from time to time they ask you to pay for ads and promotions for your store to be more visible these prices ranges from a certain value to as much as 10,000naira.
These seller platforms also sell their own products and still compete with you. Such an instance is their global sales on Jumia.
Due to all these factors a lot of counterfeit products are being introduced to these sites by desperate sellers who try to maximise profit. This in turn affects the credibility of the site and also affects the sales outcome of genuine sellers because of this bitter experiences of heightened counterfeit products and its rumours.
From my point of view it's not bad to offer discounts from time to time such as the black Friday which as the name implies is mostly a Friday thing. More like a day in a week as against the whole week. For me it's more like giving back to your customers and saying thank you for your patronage. Which is not a bad thing if it happens occasionally. But when these discounts are being putting up for a long period of time for like a month continuously it ends and then another discount is being brought up almost immediately. To me this is so wrong and this trend affects the sellers in more ways than you can think of.
It makes me view these platforms as users not minding if their partners are loosing at the long run so far they are winning with their constant non flexible commission charges, promotion cost,subscription fee and its likes.

As a seller do you think all these are right?