Lulu Haangala Wood, the co-founder and CMO of e-commerce Hub, Afrishop in her point of view said Huawei Cloud and AppGallery store support play a critical role in ensuring the success of e-commerce platforms in Africa. She was speaking at the Huawei Cloud & AI Forum at the online AfricaCom 2020 event, part of the recent concluded Africa Tech Festival.
Afrishop got support from Huawei Cloud infrastructure and Huawei AppGallery getting over 10,000+ downloads in its first week of launch and has then continued to grow over the past nine months.
Afrishop launched its offering supported by Huawei Cloud, providing convenient online shopping and affordable logistics and courier services with the aim of creating a more convenient and affordable delivery service for consumers looking for quality goods from China.
“We are available on Android and Apple app stores, but our competitive advantage has been that we are available on the Huawei AppGallery on Huawei phones, which are widely used in Africa,” said Haangala Wood. Adding that having aving that partnership from Huawei to push their app in the app store really helped them —thus seeing a big uptick in downloads.
She said there had long been a need for a good supply-chain management system to African consumers —setting out to provide convenience and affordable last-mile delivery, right to the customer’s doorstep.
“We offer B2C and B2B services for customers who want to purchase individual pieces, as well as fulfilment of bulk orders. Our main services are online shopping and supply chain management, and our solution is faster, easier and more convenient than other platforms. Our customer has access through both our app and our website, because apps don’t have a big uptake in all African territories yet,” said Haangala.
Haangala also noted that influencer marketing has been a huge part of their strategy, as well as offline marketing through traditional media even though their core has been digital marketing.
“We continue to improve our app and hope we can continue our great partnership with Huawei Cloud,” said Haangala. “Covid-19 did hit us, but we are excited to see that more people are looking to e-commerce as their preferred shopping channel.”
Afrishop operates in Zambia, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and Angola.
The Huawei Cloud & AI Forum is an event regularly hosted by Huawei for the African ICT industry. The theme at this month’s event was “New Value Together”, with the aim to establish an open, cooperative platform for customers and partners to explore new opportunities for an intelligent future.
