A Review of Kaymu Zambia, The Online Marketplace

Kaymu Zambia claims to be Zambia’s largest online marketplace but we guess its sellers didn’t get the memo that their products need to be in stock for the marketplace to ACTUALLY function.

Techtrends has been testing the Kaymu platform for the last six weeks and we can tell you that it ain’t pretty. Kaymu operates as a marketplace where sellers can interact with buyers but we guess Zambians aren’t serious sellers. We tried to order 11 products but only ONE (!) of the eleven products arrived since we started ordering items on the site in January.

CUSTOMER SERVICE – Fairly responsive. The customer service team is based in Lusaka, which is a change from late last year when random Nigerian numbers would call buyers to inform them that they’d made an order on Kaymu.

 Unknown Nigerian numbers = 419 scams and ain’t nobody got time for that!

The local team was quick to disappoint on multiple occasions when after confirming the product was ready for delivery then calling a day later to cancel the order. It didn’t make sense for the sellers to state that the item was in stock and then actually not have it.  It happened 10 times over six weeks!

PRODUCT SELECTION – One word, meh. The prices seemed affordable but the typical Zambian suspicion of cheap prices was hard to shake off. Also, the site didn’t really have much in way for a Lusaka upwardly mobile yuppie. When most savvy Zambians are shopping online, they are looking for products that they can’t get on their own. The fashion selection seems to be the same stuff one can get off the street.

Prices on electronics looked good but you never know with just buying products you can’t see for yourself. If some well-known Lusaka electronics shops were on the site, the phones would sell like hotcakes. We’re waiting on some household names to get on the site. Some improvement, though! We saw Circuit City and Computer King on the site last week.

DELIVERY – For the one successful delivery that resulted from the eleven orders made, the delivery was fairly good. The customer service team confirmed the order a day after it was made and then scheduled a same-day delivery.  We received the items from Kaymu’s delivery partner, MacSpeedy’s fairly quickly, paid for the football jersey, and after putting down an electronic signature the jersey was ours, finally.

SITE REVIEW – Simply shocked that the site has no CART! How can any internet company launch an ecommerce website with no cart? What happens to buyers who want to go on Kaymu shopping sprees? Also, this cash on delivery business is a bit cumbersome. We’re wondering when there’ll be some prepayment options.

FINAL REVIEW – When Kaymu works, it works. The delivery of a single item out of the eleven we ordered shows that when an online marketplace is functioning well, the fulfilment of orders that are in stock can happen fairly quickly. However, it seems that there’s no quality control of the sellers on the site. Sellers who don’t have items in stock should be kicked off the site. There’s no point in having buyers place orders for items that aren’t in stock.

Kaymu gets a 1 STAR rating as the site’s only redeeming quality is the quick delivery service.  Otherwise, the site needs some work before it can win over disappointed buyers who are tired of placing orders for products that are out of stock.

Looking forward to seeing more high quality sellers on the site. We’ll review Kaymu in the coming weeks. Look out for another update!