Jumia, an online retail store, has made a refund of N114,790 to Henry Abem, a Port Harcourt-based business manager, whose product was held for months.

Abem told FIJ the refund was made on Friday, four months after he ordered an item worth N114,750 from the platform.

“Jumia made a refund on Friday evening after much pressure,” Abem said.

“Special appreciation goes to FIJ because Jumia only became serious after the story went public, otherwise this would have been treated as business as usual.”

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The business manager said the refund happened after negotiations between Jumia’s settlement bank and his.

“The Jumia agent said their settlement bank (Zenith Bank) had worked on it and they were awaiting a response from Access Bank,” he said.

“She requested my account details and said she’d send a mail to Access Bank settlement team for follow-up.

“Surprisingly, at exactly 5:09 pm, I got the complete refund of N114,790. I didn’t even know they had done the refund until I saw missed calls from my account manager.”

JUMIA’S PLOY NOT TO REFUND

Abem stated that Jumia, after FIJ’s story went viral, began to make empty promises of escalating the refund.

“Jumia has been acting funny. The supervisor who called after your story went live and stopped answering my calls. All he kept saying via DM was that they were working on it and would be escalating it.

“Later, one Mr. Matthew asked me if I had got my refund. He claimed the transaction had been done and I probably didn’t get it because of issues related to the network.

“Afterwards, Jumia called to say the money had been transferred into my account, but Access Bank confirmed that I didn’t receive anything. Jumia was lying and only delayed the refund on purpose for reasons best known to them.”

On October 25, FIJ reported how Jumia refused to deliver a product Abem had paid N114,750 for. The transaction had been cancelled with the promise of a refund.

The refund dragged on with Jumia making several unfulfilled promises.

“On August 8, I got a mail from Jumia saying my order would be delayed. When the phone eventually got to Port Harcourt, I was also notified via email. I called the phone number attached to the mail and the agent said he would reach out to me when it was delivery time,” Abem said.

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“When they said they had refunded me, I wanted to reorder the item, but I later discovered that my account was still empty. I made inquiries and found out about the JumiaPay. On JumiaPay, it truly showed that I had been refunded but my actual account balance was still showing zero.

“All my attempts to reorder the item were futile, as the refund did not reflect in my account.”

Abem received a refund from Jumia two months after FIJ’s publication.