MoboFree.com, a new social marketplace in Nigeria cum Africa, is making significant inroads Nigeria, Africa’s largest online population, with 56 million internet users, targeting Nigerian brands, as it seeks to boost sales and advertising revenues.
The Company, few months ago, reported that Nigerians are selling unused items worth $526m on MoboFree.com, with high expectations that the total volume of items for sale in its marketplace will likely reach $1.5bn by 2015.
Speaking during the MoboFree social marketplace Lagos event in Lagos, weekend, Evaldas Brazys, vice president, business development for MoboFree, said, Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy by GDP, is critical to its global business plan. “Nigeria is the largest market in Africa. The country also has a very high mobile penetration rate. That’s some of the reasons why we decided to expand into the country,” he further said.
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The company is also planning to enter other African markets such ae Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe. Launched more than two years ago with head office in Vilnius, Lithuania (Eastern Europe), MoboFree has achieved 2.5 million registered members without any outside investment.
Today, the online company has 3.3 million registered members in total. With more than 3,000 new registered members are joining MoboFree every single day, the company has over 2 million registrations in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.
Sukanmi Ola, chief digital strategist at Seracuse Digital, is quite optimistic about the entry of MoboFree into Nigeria’s burgeoning digital industry. According to him, the firm is the first social marketplace in the country, and would fill a gap in the advertising and marketing industry. “The major aim of marketing is to make sales at every point in time. But, to get people to perform these transactions, you need them to be at ease, in their social state.
“As an agency, you have to move on social media platforms and e-commerce platforms as well, linking both together. But this gap MoboFree comes in to fill. It brings your social activity into your e-commerce activity, all in one place”, Ola further said.
According to him, for brands looking to make sales and engage customers at the same time, MobFree is the most suitable platform.
In terms of competitive advantages, Brazys pointed out that MoboFree is well adopted not only for Personal Computers (PCs) and smartphones but also for old phones with small screens (so called ‘feature’ phones). Available statistics however show that more than 60 percent of African population access internet only via old phones.
The online firms’ technical solution makes buying and selling online available for any African user with any device.
MoboFree is social marketplace that has unique user- centric approach as opposed to the traditional item-centric approach.
“We allow our buyers and sellers to get a lot of personal information about each other – starting from photos and common friends and ending with ratings or other data which allows to identify if person is worth to trust,” according to the company. Negotiation and communication during buying/selling process is very important part of African culture.
“We allow our members conveniently communicate and negotiate without leaving a platform. They can do it via private messages or via chat. Our members send over 8 million private messages per month,” the firm also added.
Ben Uzor
