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 www.kilimall.co.ke
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