Walmart’s Branded Stores Sit in One African Country. Its Packages Are Arriving in a Lot More.

Outside a depot in Dakar, Senegal, motorbikes and vans wait to carry packages labeled Amazon and other international brands to customers across the city. Reuters reported on July 14 that shoppers across Africa are increasingly buying from Amazon and Walmart despite the retailers having no physical presence on most of the continent, and that a class of package-forwarding intermediaries has grown up to make those purchases possible.

One of them is Afrety, a Senegalese company that Reuters reports was founded in 2018 to organize informal networks of air travelers moving goods between France and Senegal. Today it gives customers delivery addresses at warehouses in France, the United States, and China. Multiple purchases are consolidated per customer and repackaged for dispatch to West Africa, customs duties are paid on arrival, and shoppers without bank cards pay through mobile money accounts that can be loaded with cash at kiosks. Once packages land in Senegal, drivers deliver across Dakar using GPS, a workaround for the absence of formal street addresses. “You have to be very, very, very flexible. That’s the key word,” Afrety chief executive Souane Diop told Reuters.

The Infrastructure Is Being Built by Everyone Except the Retailers

The scale signals in the Reuters reporting come from the logistics side rather than the retail side. Aramex, the Dubai-based logistics group, told Reuters that sub-Saharan Africa is one of its fastest-growing regions, that demand concentrates in electronics, apparel, toys, agricultural machinery, and auto parts, and that it plans to double revenue from shipping goods to the region by 2030. The company opened a warehouse in Nigeria in April. Jumia, the Nigerian e-commerce company operating in eight sub-Saharan countries, told Reuters its Nigeria business grew roughly 50 percent over the final quarter of 2025 and that it expects to break even this year while fending off Temu and Shein. The Nigerian government has cited United Nations figures putting the country’s e-commerce market at around $75 billion in 2025.

Walmart’s actual position on the continent is more layered than a single-country description suggests, and still narrower than the demand. Walmart has owned Massmart outright since 2022, and Massmart’s corporate materials describe a footprint of more than 300 stores across eight sub-Saharan countries under banners including Makro, Game, and Builders. Walmart-branded retail is far newer and far smaller. The company announced its first branded stores in September 2025, an announcement that emphasized local sourcing and partnerships with South African suppliers. Two stores opened in the Johannesburg area that November, a third followed in Boksburg in February, and Massmart has proposed 21 more across Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape. Every one of those branded stores, open and proposed, sits in South Africa, and Massmart’s eight disclosed markets are concentrated in southern Africa. Senegal, where Reuters found the depots, is not among them. When Reuters asked whether Walmart was considering expansion into other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the company did not comment. It also did not respond to requests for data on sales volumes moving through intermediaries, which is its own kind of answer: if Walmart is measuring this demand, it is not saying so.

For Sellers, the Interesting Detail Is the Address

For 3P Marketplace sellers, the operational detail worth extracting from the Reuters reporting is how these orders enter the system. A shopper in Dakar buying through a forwarder places an order shipped to a warehouse address in the United States or France. From the seller’s side, that order is indistinguishable from domestic demand. The implication for sellers is that export demand can exist in the order file without any export program attached to it, and that repeat shipments to freight-forwarder addresses are a signal worth learning to recognize, particularly for sellers in the categories Aramex named, where marketplace assortment runs deep.

Walmart has also been building a formal mechanism for exactly this shape of demand, even if it currently points elsewhere. Retail Dive and Supply Chain Dive reported in February that Walmart was preparing to launch Walmart Exports, a program that would ship eligible Walmart Fulfillment Services items from sellers’ existing U.S. inventory to shoppers in Canada and Mexico, with more countries to be added over time. A Walmart spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive the company is testing marketplace capabilities that use its fulfillment and logistics network to reach customers shopping across borders. Nothing in that reporting puts Africa on the program’s roadmap, and sellers should not read it as if it does. What sellers can reasonably note is that the mechanism Walmart is formalizing is the same one Dakar’s forwarders are improvising, international demand served from domestic WFS inventory with the seller’s workflow unchanged, and that Walmart has already said the country list will grow.

For 1P suppliers, the relevance runs through the store network instead. Walmart’s September 2025 announcement noted that its first Growth Summit on the continent, held in April of that year, featured suppliers from 12 African countries and resulted in recruitment of small and medium-sized Africa-based suppliers. For now, the 1P story in Africa is a sourcing and store-expansion story confined to South Africa, while the demand story Reuters documented is happening everywhere else without Walmart’s participation.

The constraint on that demand is the same one shaping the forwarders’ business models. Reuters reported that customers of both Afrety and Aramex are concentrated in and near major cities, where relative wealth sits. That is a narrower market than the continent’s population figures imply, but it is also precisely the shopper any eventual formal expansion would court first, and at the moment the forwarders are the only ones running the test.

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