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