Kenya embraces online shopping breaking holiday sales records

Although Kenya is the home of the Silicon Savannah, it is known to be historically skeptical of online shopping. This year, however, the tide has turned thanks to Holiday Sales.

In the US, the day after Thanksgiving has been the busiest shopping day of the year. It is known as Black Friday, and for decades has been a cornerstone of the American shopping calendar.

When the internet came along, the rest of the world discovered Black Friday and went a step further to create Cyber Monday in 2005. These two Holiday Sales were irrelevant to Kenyans for close to a decade.

In 201 5, they’ve not only caught on; they’ve exploded. Rupu, is celebrating the great success of these two days. They offered massive discounts up to 90 percent on a wide selection of products and it paid off in a major way.

“Black Friday was, by far, our biggest shopping day in our 5 year history. To put it in perspective, we moved 2 weeks worth of stock in 24 hours and had ten times our delivery volume for the following few days just to make sure all the orders went out on time.” Alex Scholz, Head of eCommerce at Rupu.

Cyber Monday was also largely successful for Rupu with their second highest single day sales, with electronics accounting for more orders than the other categories combined.

Cedric Nzomo, Head of Marketing, explains that this change in Kenyans shopping online is not purely discount driven.

“It is also about the customer’s shopping experience.” Cedric explains. “It needs to be simple and seamless.   The team at Rupu prepared for this. We double checked everything, upgraded the site to handle the increased traffic and as a result hundreds of happy customers enjoyed a real Black Friday shopping experience.”

This was a view shared by the Jumia Kenya, whereby, thousands of anxious customers were already logged into the website minutes before the second edition of its Black Friday edition kicked off on Friday 27th midnight.

Two hours later, Jumia would make history with an all-time sales record never achieved before in the company’s history hitting a momentous 12 times its normal traffic at the end of the sale with a noticeable shift in mobile traffic at 55 percent up from 37 percent in the previous year’s black Friday while desktop traffic took a bow at 45 percent.

Parinaz Firozi MD, Jumia Kenya said, “Our Black Friday sales went up by 1000 percent which is 10 times over the same last year beating our all-time sales record 6 times. We are delighted to celebrate yet another record, the support by thousands of our loyal customers is humbling beyond words and the efforts put in by retailers selling on our online marketplace in providing strong, affordable and quality products have been and will always be rewarded.”

Even more impressive, Jumia mobile applications saw 16,000 downloads on the material day with Android accounting for 90 percent downloads. Smartphones were the most preferred accounting for 25 percent of the total categories on sale. Infinix topped the list of most preferred brands followed by footwear manufacturer and retailer Bata, while phone brand Innjoo came in third.

Traffic to site soared minutes before the limited flash sales deals were released every two hours as shoppers jostled to get the best deals in a flash with most of the categories selling out within 20 seconds.

Notably, 90 percent of all traffic and orders came from urban areas led by Nairobi, Mombasa and Nakuru. Some of the customers who missed out on the deals took to the company’s social media to air their feedback.

While Jumia’s customer service worked overtime to answer over 9,000 calls and respond to over 3200 queries on email and social media, Jumia doubled its delivery logistics team making the first Black Friday delivery in a rousing 80 minutes! Most of the company’s pick-up points that include Posta Kenya, Aramex and G4S offices in various parts of the companies have remained at peak operations as a result.