Tanzania: E-commerce continues to win hearts

Speaking at different intervals with this paper on Friday, Kay Haruna, a garment seller, said most people are used to traditional shopping methods, which require one to leave their home and walk or even drive to a store or market to purchase what he/she wants, but trading online is different.

"What happens then when the shop keeper or owner closes the store to rest on the weekend? What happens when stores are closed because it is a public holiday, rains and traffic delayed the shopkeeper or the stores are on strike? All of these are very real and (and frequent) occasions. Where do you run to during such times of need?" he queried.

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Fatna Salim, a frequent user, said that buyers can access a website and a variety of products from anywhere in the world and get instant feedback on whether the product they need is available, as opposed to traditional shopping where sometimes assurance of the availability of a product is a question and prices are relatively high.

She said one major advantage of e-commerce and specifically online markets is the fact that as long as you have internet access, you can literally be in a shop for as long as you want to be, whenever you want to be.

In late march, there were several strikes carried out by local business owners mainly at the Kariakoo market and other parts of the country, which was due to some disagreements that the business owners had with the government.

This strike was very serious in the sense that it affected many buyers, who depend on traditional shopping to get the products they need. Shops that sold online and customers that shopped online were less affected.

An example of this is Kaymu.com, where buyers continued making their purchase orders through the website and mobile application and sellers sold as usual through the Kaymu channels.

The process obviously slowed down due to the strike, but business owners had the chance to still make sales despite the troubles. "It is amazing how the advantages of online market places can be seen most clearly during situations like these.

This should push Tanzanians and Africans as a whole to buy and sell online as opposed to depending on offline buying and selling methods. Business is always changing and we need to keep up as well," said Massimiliano Spalazzi, who is Kaymu Africa's CEO.

Spalazzi said that what people need to realise is that, in times where traditional offline markets fail to provide them with what they are really looking for, namely products and services as buyers and sales as sellers, there is the other side of the coin to turn to.

"When offline markets for whatever reason fall asleep, we know we can turn to the market that never sleeps," he said. Deloitte predicts that in 2015, one billion wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be shipped, up 60 per cent from 2014, and leading to an installed base of 2.8 billion devices.

Services include all of the data plans that may be necessary to connect a device over a network, the professional services (consulting, implementation, or analysing the data) and then things like an insurance policy discount for a telematics device in a car or a wearable device for health purposes.