Kaymu has been described as a democratic social online market place. In this interviews with IT NEWS NIGERIA team, the Turkish-Canadian MD of the company, Sefik Bagdadioglu said Kaymu is focused more on social aspect of e-commerce aimed at facilitating small and medium enterprises.
Kaymu Nigeria, Why?
What brought me to Nigeria? I ran a startup in East Africa. I just love the dynamism. There is growth potentials in Nigeria e-Commerce. I know that Nigeria is a place to be. In Africa, Nigeria is the biggest economy, it has most opportunities, and it is the most challenging market. So combination of these along with potential for growth are the main reasons we are in Nigeria.
Am really passionate about e-commerce and about what we are doing here in Kaymu, helping small and medium enterprises. It is just like match made in heavens.
What Kaymu is doing differently?
What we are doing differently is that we are social online market place. I stressed the word social. What does it mean? Shopping is a social activity. When you buy your watch, before you buy it you do a lot research on it, you ask your friends, you do a lot of exchange of information and compare. This is the experience we are trying to carry to online platform. What we are doing is that focusing on social aspect of shopping. You will be able to ask the seller directly, you may have some sellers that you can follow online.
So we are focusing more on social aspect of e-commerce. While we are doing that we are focusing on small and medium enterprises. We have varieties of people on our site. We have university students who are supplementing their income way through their studies, we have mums who have opened up shops are they are selling goods. We have people who have been unemployed for 8 to 9 months, and they start selling on kaymu and some of them are top sellers.
So, anyone can sell. A physical shop owner can selling online, a non-shop owner can, an employee can sell on our site. Big brands can sell on our site. We are a very democratic platform if you like. We do sell ideas but that has not been our focus,
A very important thing to make clear about Kaymu
A very important thing to make clear is that we do not carry any of the products on our site so we are a market place. Just like back in the days, a village will have it own market place, people will come there because they know there will bunch of buyers and sellers of different products. A lot of people selling different things. The concept is the same as an online market place. We have thousands of buyers coming on our site, we have thousands of sellers coming to our site.
Technology that supports Kaymu?
I would not be able to give you details of our technology platforms. But we have a very strong team. We have strong security supporting our platform. Our user interface has been useful.
Take advantage of mobile mass market?
We published a white paper in December where we talked about some of the details our e-commerce here in Nigeria. There you will see that majority of our customers also connect to our site through mobile devices.
This falls into two. The first is through direct Apps or mobile browsers where they will use their phones to connect to Kaymu. That makes majority of our connections. So when we were designing our site, we ensure it was mobile friendly.
Kaymu reach
We deliver to pretty much of Nigeria. Of course there are limitations. We have buyers in Port Harcourt, we have buyers in Abuja, and sellers in Abuja and Port Harcourt.
Delivery Time
Abuja takes may be 4 to 5 days. I need to confirm from our site. Our logistics partners; AIG Express. they manage most of our deliveries. We encourage our buyers and sellers to use AIG Express because it provides insurance, quick delivery time and so on and so forth.
Certifying product quality on Kaymu Platform?
We do not directly ensure the quality of the products but what we have done is that: if the buyer is not satisfied with the quality of the products he has 3 days to return it. We a have dispute resolution system for cases like if a buyer is not satisfied with the products and they realize this after they open the package. They could reach out to the seller and if the seller refused to accept it , then we get involved to decide who is at fault.
Creating and growing selling day
We have similar plans. In Western Europe and North America it is called Black Friday. We did a Black Friday here. Our sales were somewhat more than our average day. We actually triple and quadruple our average day sales in one day. I think Nigeria embraced the concept of Black Friday which is very similar to Alibaba Singles’ day in China.
Popularizing Kaymu
We are a social platform. To be it doesn’t make much sense to go out there and put a big bill board. Kaymu should be spread by word of mouth. You it you refer your friend to it and he looks at it and the news goes on. In terms of that we hold last Friday a booth camp at Co-creation Hub on the roof top. A lot of people showed up because we want to encourage a healthy lifestyle with our sellers and we our buyers.
We invited our sellers to showcase their products the people who are selling cooking equipment, may weight, dehydration pack, running shoes, running T-shirts. So we hold events like this.
We are working with different organizations supporting entrepreneurship here in Nigeria.
For our customer, any person you bring to the site you get N500. You can earn up to N100,000. More people you bring you get paid. So want to use the word of mouth to reach out.
My vision and the future for kaymu
We want o be the number one social media online market place in emerging market. My vision is that people should know they can come to Kaymu they are going to have biggest assortment of products in robust platform. That is really important for me. There is not nothing you cannot find on Kaymu. At one time we were selling ram. I men ram to eat. Products are most affordable. We teach our sellers how to market our products , how they can bundle different products together. We are in constant communication with our sellers. We are a community; we help them grow they help us grow. So there is always an interaction.
We are in Nigeria to stay
I am a Turkish-Canadian. I was born and raised in Turkey. I lived in Norway, South America a little bit, lived in Canada, lived in Turkey. I also lived in Tanzania, Kenya, and now in Nigeria.
E-commerce or electronic commerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange, inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
