Boozit; Kenya's Answer to Drinks Delivery

This article first appeared in IDG Connect

“Your phone will be delivered between seven to 10 days,” read the email. And that was the start of my nightmare after I’d ordered from a local online shop.

In fact, the following weeks were a cat and mouse chase with the delivery guy, never getting my location and timing right.

This is the experience of many online shoppers in Africa, where the delivery of goods has not been well developed. If you are lucky you will get your goods within a day, but if not, it will be a long, tiring wait. There are no set standards in place.

The lack of a national street address system in most nations has also made it difficult for eCommerce to flourish and it continues to be a major obstacle.

Boozit.co.ke, an online commerce site for beverages, knows the challenges in this space all too well. The company delivers alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks to its users in Nairobi. And has also inked deals with beverage companies including Carlsberg in Kenya.

It was founded by Kariuki Maina, Collins Okatch and Robin Kiama under their umbrella company, Savannah Internet Group (SIG Africa). “We are thinking of having our own logistics company,” Maina said.

“The dynamics of logistics are the biggest challenge to eCommerce,” added Okatch. “You need to have a clear cut margin on return on investments because you don’t want to have deliveries being very expensive to you.”

The company currently relies on selling volumes of their goods rather than delivering one beer bottle, which is not cost effective.

“But also our main challenge is when we are doing the night deliveries we need to set out good measures in terms of security,” Okatch continued, bringing into focus the danger in most African cities.

SIG Africa is currently working with a startup that aims to ease the pain of domestic goods delivery.Sendy, which has been described as ‘Uber for motorcycles’, aims to use the many riders across Kenya to deliver goods for eCommerce players.

Sendy’s application is similar to Uber’s interface where you can order a delivery from your phone.

Even so, the street address problem in Africa is a huge barrier to those trying to solve the delivery challenge. Without a proper address system in place, most buyers have to be in contact with the riders to get their goods safely delivered.

OKHi, a Kenyan company is looking to leverage technology to give everyone a digital address that can be used in eCommerce deliveries.

“We are very committed to making sure that an ambulance isn’t lost getting to you in an emergency. When you order food [we want to ensure] it gets to you while it’s hot and that you don’t have to give friends turn-by-turn directions when they are coming to your house,” the company testifies on its website.

Still in trial mode and perfecting the platform, there are also hints that Sendy could partner with OKHi to offer clients a comprehensive solution.

The need to solve this problem is critical. The explosion of eCommerce mid last year signalled an increase of parcel deliveries according to the Communication Authority of Kenya (CA).

“The number of courier items sent expanded substantially by 96.3% to reach 937,619 items up from 477,526 sent last in the quarter. During the 2013/14 financial year, courier traffic considerably grew by 72.8% to stand at 2.6 million items,” the authority reported.

“This growth could be attributed to the increasing uptake of eCommerce which has seen more Kenyans transact online and have goods delivered through courier services,” it said.

The Postal Corporation of Kenya (PCK) delivers parcels within two to three days and the delivery rate is between Ksh 235 to Ksh 525 (US$3 to US$6) for a range of 5kgs to 20kgs, within the country. Depending on what is being shipped the price can be reasonable or outrageous, but it is not the preferred method by most eCommerce outlets.

“I am not sure if they can handle the process efficiently. eCommerce needs a logistics provider that understands the online market,” Robin Kiama of Boozit said.

“Delivering alcohol products door-to-door is more efficient than using PCK because it’s more time effective and convenient to the customer. The business process is much more flexible when handling a logistics provider who understands the business process of eCommerce,” Kiama added.

There have also been questions around safely of parcels at the hand of PCK. For many years, there have been complaints of letters and parcels never making it to the desired recipient, making door deliveries more convenient and safe.

The big need for a reliable delivery system completely dedicated to eCommerce logistics will only grow with the increase in online buying across the continent.

“eCommerce will always grow because the internet space is there right now. The market is there and needs to understand that this is more convenient,” Okatch concluded.

But to achieve that, it really does need to be convenient.

Online Bliss: Kenyan SMEs International Bound

The online shopping era is creeping in quick. There have been quite a number of online shopping platforms operating locally for a while now, the most notable being OLX. Although online shopping is yet to be fully embraced locally with many being weary of buying goods and products online, the trend is on an upward trajectory.

The newest entrant in the industry, Kilimall has adopted the most revolutionary model yet. It is a platform that offers shop owners a chance to open an online shop. This model has been a huge success in the developed countries. Companies like Alibaba and Amazon have grown to the biggest players in the world, giving some serious competition to the earlier players like Wallmart and other traditional supermarkets.  The ripple effect of the spread of online business is that it has created capacity for a huge number  of small and mid-size enterprises to expand their scope of business and reach markets they were never before able to. The top players have literally created thousands of millionaires.

Entry of such players as Kilimall in the local scene can be quite a milestone for local businesses. The geographical limits of conducting business will be a forgotten problem. Picture this: A small shop owner selling jewellery or outfits in downtown Nairobi can easily get clients from Rwanda and S.Africa without having to open up branches in these countries. This will potentially have an explosive the SME sector as more and more Kenyan products get to reach wider circles.

As a shop owner, the most attractive aspect of this is that the costs of doing business from your end are kept at almost nil. The trick to make a successful entry into the online shopping business is to get a professional platform to operate from. Such a platform should offer you a back-end access so that you can be able to trace all transactions that relate to the goods. Otherwise the logistical mess with the absence of such a service would be one big nightmare.

Kilimall is the first platform that offers shop management options to merchants. The platform has attracted quite a number of big merchants already, despite being just over one month old. Baus Optical, Panasonic, Sony, Konka, Lenovo among many others already have set online shops on Kilimall. So what is making Kilimall an attractive site for merchants? To put it plainly, the solutions offered by Kilimall if quantified comparatively to setting up your own E-platform or online shop would set you off more than one million bob.

The most attractive feature is the Integrated Conversion Tracking. With this, you have access to your shop’s backend and you’re able to track all your transactions. You can see who bought your products, when, the payment and delivery details. You also get a custom domain. For instance, baus has theirs set as baus.kilimall.co.ke. You can customize your shop with your brand colors, banners and posters. With this, why would you need to invest in a website? The platform allows you to display an infinite number of products and services for an unlimited amount of time. This means that you can display thousands of products without having to worry about storage and display space. Delivery fees are catered for by the customer and delivery is done by professional delivery companies.

This is the biggest revolution yet. I can bet that opening a shop on www.kilimall.co.ke would be worth a lot to you.

REDEFINING THE FUTURE OF SHOPPING IN KENYA: INTRODUCING KILIMALL

Shopping is a normal and necessary day-to-day routine for everyone. People go shopping for different reasons. Some go for shopping as an essentiality of life; to get the groceries, to buy some new clothes, to get a mobile phone replacement, to stock furniture for a new house and all that. In this type of shopping, emphasis is on need; you buy what you really need. It’s mostly done to satisfy the basic needs, although there may be a splash on luxuries every now and then. 

Others take shopping as a leisure activity. They prefer the large malls, the likes of Sarit Centre and Thika Road Mall. Apart from stocking up on the basics, they also treat themselves to some pampering, lounging in the spas and coffee houses, or indulging in some junk food frenzy. They stroll from shop to shop buying a handbag from here, the latest smartphone from there, catching up on Box Office movies et-al. For this group, shopping is spontaneous, and the buying of goods and services is largely impulsive.

Whatever the reason people go shopping nowadays, the experience is becoming more and more undesirable. Even as shopping malls get more sophisticated and exciting, several factors make many people shun shopping, or limiting them to shopping as a necessity.

One of the key factors that lead to this is cost. The cost of goods and services is on an ever upward spiral. Although it’s understandable to have the cost of goods shifting depending on the prevailing economic and other conditions, it’s becoming increasingly hard to know the real value of a commodity. A lot of unscrupulous traders use ignorance or plain greed to seriously rip-off unsuspecting consumers with insanely hiked costs.

The other factor is convenience, or more importantly the lack of it. The thought of getting to a shopping mall in the first place in itself is already nauseating. Traffic jams are a constant headache. You end up spending more money on fuel than you would on the actual shopping! The state of security is that you can only do your shopping in daylight or risk getting mugged. We can go on and on on the issues.

There is some good news to all this though. Shopping is getting revolutionized. E-commerce is increasingly gaining popularity in the country. Although a huge success in the developed world, where platforms like Amazon, EBay and Taobao rake in billions of dollars in revenue every year, it has been slow to catch up on the continent. With the massive reorganization of ICT infrastructure in the recent past, online shopping is catching up fast!

There has been a major gap to fill in the e-commerce platform locally though. For a long time it has been really hard to get quality, variety and trustworthy products at affordable rates.

That is bound to change with the entry of Kilimall into the local online shopping market. Kilimall is the first online shopping mall in Kenya and Africa. It is a lot more than an online shop; it is a platform that can host thousands of diverse shops, cumulatively offering hundreds of thousands of different merchandise and services. What this means is that you can shop for and buy practically anything from your home, office or even as you are commuting in a matatu and get the goods delivered to you at any location of your choice! 

Kilimall has a quality assurance team that ensures all merchants who host products on the platform meet set quality thresholds. Merchants can create, manage, add products, customize their shops and keep track of their sales. The most attractive bit is that it is absolutely free to host a shop on Kilimall.

Presently, for Nairobi, you can order online and get the goods delivered to you within a maximum period of forty eight hours. This is already record-breaking. The plan is to reduce that time to a maximum of three hours with customers getting deliveries in record times of up to fifteen minutes.

 You can shop on Kilimall via Kilimall

 

A Cultureless Society

Sometime back, I came across a rather ordinary-looking title to an article; “What makes us Kenyan?” The writer went ahead to show how Ugandans take pride in their rich culture that modernity has done little to alter, the Ethiopians and their coffee and unique cuisine among an array of other such examples.

And this made me ask myself; have we always been cultureless?

A popular Jamaican Musician 'dances' with a kenyan lady

Most first-time visitors are shocked, for lack of a stronger word, on setting foot in this country. The dressing, speaking, the food we eat, how we live. In fact, some parts of our great cities are more western than western countries! Take the ordinary Nairobian youngster for instance; He’s working probably, or in college most certainly. He lives in a flat, decorated with nice sound and visual systems. iPhones, Blackberries  and other such gadgets are the order of the day. He’s very tech-savvy, knows twitter language better than its founders and is generally arrogantly ‘knowledgeable’. His mode of dressing follows the urban trend; sagging jeans now, rainbow-colored pants next, an over-sized pair of T-shirt now and then. Studs are the in-thing, sneakers like Jay Zs and an American accent that leaves  even the residents of the harsh neighborhoods of Seattle staring in awe. To him, listening to Kenyan music, especially that which has a traditional feel to it is ‘down’ and unprogressive. In fact, such music should not be listened to by any member of this generation.  They ‘can’t speak’ proper Swahili, leave alone their own mother tongues. Who talks in such primitive tongues?

The ladies are not to be left behind. In fact, they are the weirder; walking in the cold rain with a little more than a swimsuit because they saw Rihanna in it in her latest video. They have even funnier accents, and you’ll be left wondering whether half of Kenyan ladies have simultaneously visited an array of Asian, European and American states for extended periods of time.

Ours is a conglomeration of virtually all ways of life; with some living like Jamaicans as others believe they are the ballers of New York City.

Then there’s the eating habits; You’ll find long queues in famous American fast food outlets like McFry’s, KFC, Chicken Inn among others. Eating Fries is cool. Mukimo? Ugali? Kunde? What’s that?

Now, there’s nothing wrong with copying practices from other cultures. In fact, no society can claim to progressively reform from their own initiatives alone. We’ll always need this here, and that from there. But to what extent should we imitate?

Sometime back, in fact not too long ago, TV programs that had the slightest hint of a kiss were tucked away late in the night, after the nine o-clock news. It was a taboo for anyone below eighteen to watch such films. Nowadays, the degree to which nudity is exposed is appalling. Adverts, music videos and virtually all visual medium have a heavy use of sex appeal. In fact, you’ll even see News Anchors deliberately dressed in low-cut tops and tight, short skirts to show off  their bosoms and flaunt their hips and derrieres.

The degree of tolerance for obscene content is unbelievably high. Kids grow up and adapt to the norms that they are acclimated to. How will a parent tell his seven-year old not to play around with girls yet that’s what everything that surrounds him/her shows them that that’s cool? The effect of this is that we can no longer control what they do. Ten-year old mothers and fathers will be what will define our society, and a teenage population that’s so engrossed in drugs and sexual activity they cannot think about tomorrow. When our girls start using emergency contraceptives before they’re twelve, we should not rally on twitter to condemn such. It’s what we’re cultivating as our culture.

And when a society burns the social fabric with acid, it ceases being a progressive society. It graduates to a rotten society.

Nairobians Are Good People, Actually

It’s your typical weekday evening in Nairobi. People are, as usual, walking fast towards their respective bus stops; With the exception of the ten percent who drive and the other thirty percent who simply can’t afford the inflated fares and opt to walk the sometimes treacherously long way home. The hustle and bustle is at its peak; the queues at the matatu termini at their longest.  You can see it in the people’s faces. They are tired! They just want to get home.

A bus park in Nairobi

Yours truly is among those walking towards the matatu termini. I walk down Kimathi Street past Nation Centre then left to Odeon.  Why is it that Nairobi folk rarely smile? I can’t help wondering as I make my way and I find myself smiling to myself as I watch faces in half and full frowns walk past. Seems like almost everyone has a bad day, every day!

Anyway, like everyone else I choose to mind my own business until I finally get to my stage. The place is noisy of course. Touts shouting their voices hoarse trying to lure the stranded commuters into their over-priced music-blaring contraptions, heavy music systems, hawkers, idle chatter… couldn’t help wondering how I don’t suffer a headache every day.

I reluctantly get into a matatu after waiting  twenty minutes for the fare to drop to no avail Frankly; I have never understood why I have to pay 60 Shillings every morning and evening for a ten-minute journey. Does anyone in government know what we have to go through?? We need some regulation here!

The matatu fills up pretty fast. I sit next to a talksome old man in a dark suit and a tie with a big smile who asks me why we are switching to digital TV. “Who wants to watch seventy channels? I find one channel to be too much already. Can you watch seventy channels?” he asks, rhetorically of course. I had to agree with that. We don’t need seventy channels!! I couldn’t help admiring the old man’s cheerfulness at that age. He should teach Nairobians a few lessons on the need to be cheerful!

We are somewhere in Ngara when one passenger in the fourteen-sitter notices that the conductor had been left behind and notifies the driver. Why do they get out of the matatu whenever the driver wants to take a U-Turn? The vehicle has side mirrors I mean, or is it to reduce the weight? So the driver decides to stop and wait. Five long minutes pass and there is no sign of the conductor. Passengers start getting restless.

Then old man comes up with a suggestion. He offers to collect the fare on behalf of the conductor and hand it to the driver. How could the rest of our younger brains fail to think about that? Maybe we think about ourselves too much at times. We all agree with old man’s proposal. The driver too. We are soon moving again. The collection goes on without incident and the money is handed to the driver.

So these are tired people crammed into a noisy van, whose crew’s only intention is to extort them of as much of their hard-earned cash as possible, every morning and evening. And instead of grabbing the once-in-a-longtime opportunity of a free ride home, we diligently give the crew what belongs to them; To the last cent.

So many scenarios would have happened here. The most natural would have been not to raise the red flag at all for the ride home. The other would have been to give out less money since we would easily have overpowered the driver. But no, old man collects all the money and hands it all over!

Nairobians are said to be bad people. Not friendly, not helpful, you know the type that stands at an accident scene to watch instead of help the victims? But every single day, simple acts done by these same people make me believe that there’s a lot of good deep down them. Simple acts of care that are often overlooked, but they are there.

Now if that isn’t good, I don’t know what is!