Online shops brace for brisk business ahead of Xmas
The Savo Store website. PHOTO | DIANA NGILA
As retailers prepare for Christmas festivities in about 10 weeks, local e-commerce platforms like Savo Store and VituMob are bracing themselves for a busy season as more orders from Kenyans buying products from American retailers begin to trickle in.
Unlike the usual e-commerce sites, the two platforms offer shipping services where goods are delivered to a customer’s doorstep within three weeks after the order is made.
Savo Store and VituMob in their quest to ease trade barriers between Kenya and America opened platforms that allow locals to buy products from US retailers like Forever21, Apple Store, Amazon, eBay and Clarks.
The platforms have now marked the beginning of a busy three-month period, they say, and expect the number of orders to overshoot those recorded in other months of the year. The growing number of orders is set to come from discounted sale usually associated with holidays and deals from days like Black Friday.
Traditionally, people are known to spend more during festive seasons as they buy gifts for loved ones in preparation for Christmas.
“The last three months of the year tend to be the busiest because of the holiday shopping season. Most American retailers will offer extensive discounts and deals on products during this period,” said Sidney Karanja, co-founder Savo Store.
“Shopping holidays such as Black Friday on November 25, tend to drive increased shopping activity by our customers due to the remarkable online discounts offered by US retailers. This leads to a major influx of customers during this period,” he added.
The two are the only local stores that bridge the gap between local shoppers and American online stores. Locals are able to buy goods by visiting VituMob and Savo Store’s sites, where they are linked to various online shops.
Shoppers identify products they want to buy from the online shops then using the two platforms’ automated quote requests get the full cost of the items, including shipping cost and taxes. Buyers have the option of making payments through their cards or mobile money.
The sites have shopping guides that outline various categories to ease the experience of their customer base which has since grown to include corporate clients.
“One category of our shoppers is made up of those who have lived abroad and have settled back. This category comes to us looking for their favourite brands of consumer goods not available in Kenya, they are generally looking to shop from stores they are familiar with back in the US & UK and we act as a means to get these items,” said VituMob’s Leah Kirugumi.
Ms Kirugumi said that the other category is Kenyans within the middle to upper class with a ‘‘wish list’’, meaning they are interested in goods they see online and which are not available locally.
A big win
Both Savo Store and VituMob do not have a limit on the amount of goods that can be shipped to the country, a factor that has been a big win with their corporate clients.
The growth of cross border e-commerce has been such a success that Mr Karanja says Savo Store is planning to introduce a sea freight service before the end of the year in an effort “to accommodate customers importing container loads of goods and heavy industrial machinery that cannot be shipped economically via airfreight.”
The proliferation of mobile phones and penetration of the Internet in Kenya has also exposed locals to new trends and habits that are shaping how they consume products.
Social networking sites such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, Mr Karanja says, influence customer purchase decisions more than ever before.
The idea to start VituMob came after the founder, Mathew Meyer, an American who lived in Kenya for a period of time before returning to the US, experienced difficulties while making purchase from US based online stores.
“Upon returning to the US he kept getting help calls from his friends back here to find a way to get stuff to them either through relatives who were travelling or friends and as such the idea of VituMob was born to ease trade barriers between these two worlds and open up Kenya and Africa to the same shopping privileges available to US citizens initially, and later the UK,” says Ms Kirugumi.
Mr Karanja says Savo Store was set up at a time when people around him were eager to source goods from Western markets as opposed to the local market.
“We slowly came to understand that the reason for this was that markets such as the US offered a wider variety of goods which in most cases were of superior quality than those available in the local market. This became the main impetus behind Savo Store.”
