Paga, ACE, Cousant and Anozim owned by former Konga marketing exec, Onyeka Akumah, have teamed up to launch an online storefront for small e-commerce companies, Shoppey. It’s a ready-made catalog of customizable digital storefronts that can be bought by small e-commerce outfits.
This is a perfect coup. Payments, meets marketing, meets logistics and web development. It’ll be interesting to see what more economies come with owning a storefront up on Shoppey.
The pricing is already slightly prohibitive at N130,000 ($653) for the basic silver plan and N400,000 ($2010) for the premium platinum plan. Earlier players like 500 shops, other available e-commerce marketplace options including listing on Jumia or Konga’s marketplace aren’t as pricey. Same for customizing an e-commerce template or even listing on OLX, but Shoppey says the services that bundle with the service is worth it.
“That’s set-up, customization, marketing, payments and logistics all taken care of, as well as ongoing support to help you grow and get the most out of your online shop,” MyShoppey says.
Even with these bundled services, a small holding e-commerce operator will do a double take before signing on.
Shoppey claim this is all about the startup’s business outlook. “It is important that merchants start believing in their vision and start building their brand through differentiation – and that is what Shoppey is offering,” a company spokesperson told TechCabal..
“We are also different from Konga because Shoppey does not charge a fee per transaction. All the money the merchant makes goes to the pocket of the merchant. We only charge a nominal support fee to ensure we can keep each merchant’s site running and to provide a support desk for any queries our merchants may have on logistics, payments, technical or marketing.
“We believe our pricing is quite competitive . Today, a web developer can charge anything between N120,000 to N1,000,000 for building a unique e-commerce site without digital marketing or logistics setup, but Shoppey is doing things differently for the merchants.
“There is nowhere else a merchant can get all these benefits without paying far more than any of the quoted prices on Shoppey.
“Shoppey is a service for the SMEs and at every stage we want to get it right for our merchants. We will continue to give value to our merchants even after the launch of their online shops. For example, we are already exploring features for our merchants to directly request financing at the click of a button from their admin backend as we all know that financing is also a big issue that needs to be solved for SMEs. We will continue listening to our merchants and through a strategy of continuous feedback, technology and partnerships, we will slowly remove the stumbling blocks that make it difficult for SMEs to be successful in e-commerce.
