Huawei Cloud can play a critical role in ensuring the success of e-commerce platforms in Africa. This is the view from Lulu Haangala Wood, the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Afrishop, an e-commerce hub offering convenient quality shopping, and affordable logistics to the African market.
During the Huawei Cloud & AI Forum at the recently concluded online AfricaCom 2020 event, part of the Africa Tech Festival that run from November 9th to 13th. Lulu noted the aggregated use of Huawei cloud in improving the uptime and reliability of Afrishop.
Having launched its portal supported by Huawei Cloud to provide convenient online shopping, affordable logistics, and courier services. Afrishop aims at creating a more convenient and affordable delivery service for consumers looking for quality goods from China.
The Afrishop taste of uptime on Huawei cloud
In its launch and development stages, Afrishop got support from Huawei Cloud Infrastructure and Huawei AppGallery –– the app store on non-Google management services (GMS) Huawei smartphones.
“We are available on Android and the Apple app store, but our competitive advantage has been that we are available on the Huawei AppGallery for Huawei phones which are widely used in Africa, the partnership with Huawei to push our app in the app store really helped us, and we saw a big uptick in downloads.”
Furthermore, Lulu noted that for a long time, there has been a need for a good supply-chain management system for African consumers. In a bid to address the challenge, Afrishop targets to provide convenience and affordable last-mile delivery right to the customer’s doorstep.
“Our main services are online shopping and supply chain management, and our solution is faster, easier, and more convenient than other platforms. Our customers get access both through our app and website, this is because apps don’t have a big uptake in several African regions yet.”
Additionally, Afrishop registered over 10,000 downloads in its first week by leveraging the Huawei cloud support system and has since continued to grow over the past 9 months. So far, the platform is available in Zambia, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and Angola as noted by Lulu.
Annually, the Huawei Cloud & AI Forum is hosted for the African ICT industry. This year, the forum run under the theme “New Value Together” and with notable case studies from Afrishop, the brand’s cloud services continue to present an opportunity for the growth of Africa’s eCommerce ecosystem.
For eCommerce platforms like Afrishop, the reliability of cloud computing providers like Huawei cloud presents an opportunity to grow. By this standard, providers like Jumia, Kilimall, Gearbest continue to be most preferred by customers across Africa.