In recognition of its contributions and commitment to the growth of e-commerce, Nigeria’s largest online mall, Konga.com has been presented with the prestigious Kalahari Award for the E-Commerce Provider of the year 2015 at a ceremony held in Lagos as part of the 5th Mobile Money Expo.
The organizers of the award stated that Konga.com distinguished itself in the areas of innovation, scalability, impact and robustness of system for e-commerce in Nigeria.
The award was received by Sim Shagaya, the Founder and CEO of Konga.com.
Speaking at the Mobile Money Expo titled ‘Payments and the Challenges for E-commerce’, Shagaya made a call for the finance sector to provide ideal e-commerce payment solutions for Nigeria.
According to Shagaya, key difficulties such as high return rates and the burden for e-commerce companies to develop their own proprietary operational systems were due to the gap in payment systems.
Speaking of Konga’s Marketplace, he explained how Konga started as a retailer, selling goods from its warehouse, and that the platform expanded to a market place allowing people to open stores and trade.
From April 2014 when the platform became a marketplace to December 2014 over 11,000 businesses had signed up to trade their goods on Konga’s Marketplace.
“With Konga’s marketplace, we are seeing a lot of growth. People want to trade, but they don’t want to have to pay up to 2 years rent upfront to rent a store in some cases”, Sim Shagaya said.
He revealed that, “Konga.com prides itself in the fact that people can order from every Local Government Areas in the country and get their item delivered at their doorstep, unlike other e-commerce sites in Nigeria that deliver only on the capital cities.”
The Mobile Money Expo is a gathering of top executives from mobile network operators, banks, e-commerce providers, regulators, card processors, switch providers, systems and application providers.
At the Expo, the annual Kalahari Awards are presented to organizations that have made noteworthy impact in the digital financial services sector and are projected to make even more significant market impact in the future.
