Evangeline Wiles is the Managing Director of Nigeria’s pioneer online marketplace, Kaymu.com.ng. By January, 2015, the marketplace marked two years anniversary in Nigeria, celebrating their successes in pulling over 20, 000 SMEs to their platform and expanding to five other cities across the country. In this Interview with JONAH NWOKPOKU, she argues that efficient delivery system remains the backbone of e-commerce.

She also speaks on how the marketplace navigated successfully Nigeria’s SME sector and how small businesses can explore the fledgling e-commerce sector and become more successful. Excerpts

Kaymu has just marked two years anniversary, how have you fared in your quest to bring SMEs in Nigeria online?

Since inception in January 2013, Kaymu has been at the forefront of driving entrepreneurship in Nigeria by providing a safe platform for SMEs to conduct business online.

The growth in our seller base didn’t happen overnight, it’s been a journey that has seen us grow from 50, to 1,000 and now over 20,000 sellers all over Nigeria. Our goal is to make it simple and easy for anyone to have an online store and join in the e-commerce revolution.

Most SME operators in Nigeria are people, whose businesses belong to the informal sector, what strategy has helped you navigate successfully in this sector?

Across Nigeria, we have field agents that go to major informal markets as well as major malls to tell sellers about the benefits of selling online. We believe this is an incredible opportunity to move these markets online and provide sellers with a platform to market their goods to anyone across Nigeria. Our success is based on the simple fact – all business people are looking for ways to grow their business and an online shop is an easy, convenient and cost effective way to do that.

Over the past two years, you have expanded to various cities, from your experience, what has been the rate of uptake?

Our expansion has been driven by demand from our sellers. We had sellers in Abuja, Port Harcourt and several other cities before we opened offices there. For us, this was an indication of the significant opportunity across Nigeria, which resulted in the expansion of Kaymu to Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Benin and Warri in the past six months. The uptake and reception to online shopping has been very encouraging, especially since we haven’t done a lot of above-the-line advertising efforts in these states yet.

What can you say have been the major challenges facing SMEs and how can platform like yours help address these challenges?

Research has shown that most SMEs fail within their first five years of existence with only a few surviving to grow into maturity in developing countries like Nigeria. Some of the factors responsible are; inadequate market research, irregular power supply, infrastructure inadequacies, and limited capital, amongst others. E-commerce can address some of these challenges for SMEs.

The beauty of a platform like Kaymu is that sellers can open and operate a business with minimal upfront investment – all you need is a smartphone and small amount of capital to buy or make your products. What makes Kaymu stand out from other e-commerce platforms is our dedication to SMEs. We have a dedicated team to help our sellers manage and grow their businesses.

Logistics is one of the challenges impeding the growth of e-commerce in Nigeria, what ideal logistics strategy can help SMEs integrate successfully into e-commerce?

Logistics is a field that still requires improvement in Nigeria and it is interesting to see that with the advent of e-commerce, more logistics companies are expanding their capacities to adequately attend to the enormous demand. Fast and timely delivery is one of the most important aspects of e-commerce. Unfortunately, many SMEs do not have the capabilities to achieve this on their own. To help our sellers with logistics, Kaymu has relationships with top logistics companies, such as Fedex and AIG Express.

Over the last two years, Kaymu introduced some initiatives, like Kaymu Varsity, SME Saturdays, aimed at encouraging SME growth in Nigeria, what is your assessment of the response so far? And how can such initiatives help drive SME growth in Nigeria?

Initiatives like KaymuVarsity and Kaymu Entrepreneurial Workshop are focused on training SMEs how to maximise their sales online through excellent product placement, efficient customer relations and new media marketing strategies. SME Saturdays is an initiative to integrate both the online and offline experience for buyers and sellers. Here, buyers can shop from the Kaymu platform and get their products immediately.

All these initiatives are important because they help entrepreneurs develop the skills and capabilities that are needed to succeed. We’ve gotten great feedback on these programs and we intend to continue to help Nigerian entrepreneurs reach their potential.

Mobile Money

Listing on Kaymu has remained free over the last two years, what has informed this decision and what direction do you intend to take in terms of monetisation in the future?

Our focus in the past two years has been on building a good foundation. We have a commission structure in place and we intend to start applying it once a seller reaches a volume threshold. At the moment, our focus is on growing the community.

How imperative is it for SMEs to migrate online vis-a-vis your vision to be the leading marketplace in Africa?

Our vision is to be the foremost online shopping community for buyers and sellers in Africa. The reason is simple, gone are the days where you had to spend hours going to the market, haggle with sellers for the best price before getting a product. Now customers want to be able to shop from the comfort of their homes, at the most competitive prices and have it delivered to them when they need it. All this can be achieved through

The importance of sellers migrating from brick-and-mortar retail to click-and-mortar cannot be overemphasized. They save money which would have been used for rent, staff salary and running of their store and thus can afford to fix competitive prices on their products. With offline stores, sellers only make sales when a buyer walks into their shops, but with online shopping, buyers all over Africa can make purchases at the click of a button.