One thing we observed in the year 2021 was the rise of eCommerce in Zimbabwe. It has certainly been in a dark place but with more and more developments in the space, it’s safe to say it is emerging gradually. Without a doubt, the expression of eCommerce that has received the most attention and coincidentally most well received by the public has been fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). ShopExpress is a competent entrant into the market that I was impressed by as I was allowed to try them out by Tafanenyasha Chandiwana founder and CEO.
On the surface, it’s easy to assume that ShopExpress is just another entrant in the FMCG eCommerce market who will give us much of the same in both the good and the bad. They have a store. They have a cart. They have products. But as you start to look around you realise that they have applied some best practice thinking to arrive at a concept that could go very far. It requires a location to find the vendors nearest to you. So clearly ShopExpress is set up to be an aggregator as Tafanenyasha Chandiwana explained to me. This always excites me because the Internet has been owned by aggregations.
There’s more to it. The website conveniently allows you to shop by brand. This makes shopping much more convenient if you have made up your mind on what you are looking for down to the brand. For those who have not fully made up their mind, there is a competent search function that allows you to find items by name or keyword. The shop categories are very well set up and make navigating them intuitive. The rest of the website design is clear and clean. The team have worked very hard to make sure that all products have images and to have some sort of uniformity between the images. You will find browsing the website smooth and enjoyable on a computer, tablet or mobile phone.
Enough about user interface and experience, let’s talk about the process of doing business through them. The process is made as simple as possible. You find the product, select the quantity and add it to the cart. You can review and change your cart at any point along the process. Once you have settled on your items progressing is easy. You may be asked to sign up but can also use the simple sign in with Google, Facebook or Apple ID. The next step is to confirm your option of pick up or delivery. If you nominate delivery you will also confirm the delivery address. Then it’s on to payment.
While viewing the site you can nominate to view prices in US Dollars, British Pound Sterling or South African Rand. This tells you a little more about the targets for ShopExpress as they want to enable those buying from abroad for family and friends a simple and effective method of doing so. They currently accept payment through DPO (International cards), Paynow (local cards) and cash on delivery. You may call back to this article on the rise of takealot.com in South Africa and how cash on delivery helped them grow their large footprint.
While they have an extensive offering the goal is to get more products onboard to offer total convenience. Currently, delivery charges are set to US$5. This is roughly par for the course in Zimbabwe as things stand. By keeping things simple ShopExpress has managed to put together an effective product. Tafanenyasha takes pride in the work they have put into designing the processes behind the business. With expectations that eCommerce will experience growth in Zimbabwe in 2022 businesses like ShopExpress are what we expect to see more of.
To find out more about ShopExpress go to their website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
