Africa has seen its fair share of daily deal sites. South Africa currently has approximately 30 daily deal sites, with Kenya hosting 4 daily deal sites, with a Mobile Planet’s Sahizi.com making a late debut.
According to Mocality Country Manager for Kenya, Mr. Joshua Mwaniki, the current players are barely scratching the surface, he said during a HumanIPO interview. Since the inception of their deals site, Mocality has had over 6,000 buyers on the site.
Groupon, the global giant in daily deals, has seen success in recent years and even has gone public. This could be replicated in this region. Mr. Mwaniki says if the day daily deals site will sell 10,000 deals daily, then it would be a viable and very profitable business. He exudes confidence that Mocality is now the most successful daily deal site in the country, despite being in the market for a short while.
According to Ben Maina, CEO of RUPU, another Daily Deal website in Kenya, “The deals space has room for growth in a number of ways, an increase in the number of deals is just one dimension of growth. Over time the platforms that manage to remain competitive and innovative will remain,” he told HumanIPO. For Rupu, “our success rate remains above 90% “ Maina says.
Mr. Mwaniki says that daily deals are not about pushing the product (sales) but more of marketing businesses. He gives an example of a salon business that offered a deal on the site, acrylic nail sets, and the customers referred ended up spending 2,000 to 3,000 shillings (app $25 to $35). “If you expect to make sales on daily deal sites, you will be disappointed,” he says.
One big setback is Kenya’s attitude towards e-commerce. Kenyans still feel the internet is very unsafe for doing business, but daily deal sites are slowly changing this perception. “Kenyans still feel insecure about online transactions,” he told HumanIPO. But user who have bought products from daily deal sites, feel a little less apprehensive when they come across an e-commerce site.
