Konga, Nigeria’s largest online shopping mall, is gearing up for its busiest shopping day of the year, Yakata, the Nigerian equivalent of ‘Black Friday’. The main event will run from November 18 to 21st, when the online marketplace will slash prices on tens of thousands of consumer goods.
Yakata, which literally means ‘when something big falls in a big way’, was started by Konga in 2013, to give Nigerian online shoppers the benefits of huge discounts on leading consumer goods. Last year, at its peak, the company was processing over 100 laptops an hour from its Lagos-based headquarters, and sold thousands of items in a 24 hour period. This year, the ecommerce giant expects its marketplace to generate N2.5Bn [USD 8M] during Yakata, making it the Konga’s busiest shopping day in the company’s history.
It comes as no surprise that for Yakata 2015, the item most searched for and ordered by Nigerian shoppers in the world’s second most ‘mobilized’ country, was the mobile phone, swiftly followed by home appliances, laptops and fashion. The most popular consumer brands include Samsung, Snookor, Hp, Alcaltel, and Blackberry. Last year, Yakata took over 79,000 orders, with the in-house team dealing with 1,000 inbound calls per hour, and, at its peak, processing almost 2,700 orders in an hour. Building on the success of Nigeria’s ‘Black Friday’, the Konga team is looking to make Yakata 2016 bigger yet.
Amidst the challenging economic climate in Nigeria, Konga CEO Shola Adekoya, remains optimistic for a blockbuster 2016. He says, “We are expecting a buoyant Black Friday or, as we like to call it, Yakata, 2016. Just like Black Friday in the West, Yakata kicks off the holiday shopping season for us retailers. As millions of Nigerians are feeling the pinch financially, we know that they will be looking out for the very best value for their money, and will be visiting Konga to source the best deals. Our customer service teams are already receiving hundreds of queries a day concerning what offers we will be offering this year, so we have strong indications as to what our shrewd shoppers are on the lookout for.
“Our 60,000+ merchants are mobilized and ready to sell their stock at super-heavily discounted prices to our one million+ customers throughout Nigeria. As e-commerce continues to grow at a furious pace in Nigeria, we are prepared for a massive influx of traffic, primarily from mobile, from both existing and new customers, who will benefit from the largest range of consumer goods online, as well as speedy and reliable order fulfilment”.
Konga recently launched ‘Fulfilled by Konga’, whereby its 60,000+ merchants can now store and have all their orders delivered by Konga’s in-house team, reducing processing times from 40 hours to 3 hours, a 90% reduction. The company’s technical team has also been preparing for the huge increase in traffic during Yakata, and will be relying on its ultra-optimized mobile platform, that is data efficient, to meet the needs of Nigerian online shoppers.
