When many Nigerians were skeptical of going into the online marketing, the chief executive officer of kara.com.ng, Saheed Balogun, took the plunge. According to him, the terrain was unknown and unpredictable, but he was determined to give it a try. Today, six years after, for the Electronics and Computer Engineering graduate of the Lagos State University, the effort paid off and he keeps waxing stronger in the online marketing turf. His company won the 2017 Nigeria Information Technology Awards (NITA) for e-Commerce start ups. Here are the excerpts of his chat with The Nigerian Xpress
What motivated you to start kara.com.ng?
The motivation is that I’m someone with interest in the process of buying and selling of goods. And I decided that I wanted to be a player in the market place where people will buy and sell goods and get quality goods and price. That prompted me to set up kara.com.ng. Initially, I felt I could just open up a small shop and start getting orders but I realised that it is not going to be so easy as a startup. So, I decided to go online, as a means of reaching out to more customers at a competitive price. The alternative rule would have been having several people on your payroll, going about looking for customers, so we saw online as a means to quickly gain access to a broader market across several states without having need to take transport from one point to another.
How long have you been into this online business?
We began the online shopping business in April 2013. It is six years now.
What has been the experience so far? What were the initial challenges you faced as a startup?
Typically for most startups, kara.com.ng was not an exception, the first challenge is going into a territory that is new even to you yourself and, of course, some of the equipment you have to make available, it was… it is a definitely a learning curve to understanding how the e-Commerce operates from the point of getting visitors to know about your site and getting shoppers to make a decision to buy from your site and after buying, ensuring that you can deliver the orders.
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What has been your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) given the large number of online shopping malls in the country today?
My USP like that of every business is not a static factor, because if you have something unique and everybody knows what is unique then, of course, they can copy that uniqueness and it no longer becomes unique. So, there has never been a specific USP that remains forever, but one thing we ensure that is we remain customer-focused and we ensure that we are on top of our game. Our responsibility is to ensure that we fulfill our promises to our customers in terms of ensuring that they get quality goods and whatever warranty that is available on the goods by the manufacturer that they are able to enjoy the warranty and we are able to deliver to them as promised. So, these are the key things that we value as a business and those are what we work to do every day.
How do you treat your customers?
By the nature of our business, it is actually not only about sales; we also advise customers. We open up and allow customers to get closer to us, interact with us, we give them advice, they ask about the products. If, for instance, you want to buy a battery for your inverter or you want inverter, we want to ensure your battery is actually at fault, we don’t just sell the battery and walk away. We need to understand their conditions. So, we provide consultancy services to our customers at zero cost. That is what we do and as we proceed from the site, a lot of the products we sell are technical related products. I mean electronic and electrical, we give people advice. You want to buy a generating set, we ask for the specification, what size of the load it’s going to be used for and all that. We advise you that this capacity is not good for you. This is what you should buy based on the specification of load you want to use it for. So, we give such advice to our customers to give them value for whatever they buy from us.
It has been six years into the online shopping business, what is your success story?
For me, the story has been the fact that day after day we are able to gain new customers and we do have customers, who always come back to us, who always want to do business with us, because they value the relationship we have built with them. Of course, also, the fact that we have a dedicated workforce, and dedicated team players, who understand that to succeed, team work is an essential part of success. That, for me, being able to build the human resource that can meet or exceed the customers’ expectations is the greatest success I can say I have achieved over the years on this journey. Another of our success story is that we won the 2017 e-Commerce startup of the year by the Nigeria Information Technology Awards.
How lucrative is the online shopping business? What are the challenges?
Challenge of online business is a completely different terrain and experience. I will not say it is not lucrative but there are definitely a lot of challenges because it is a business powered by technology and the cost of acquiring technology in Nigeria is not easy. Cost of Internet is still high and generally there are other costs of doing business, the logistics, the nature of the roads. For example, if you have an order to deliver in a place like Ajah, you may spend the whole day on that trip. As a business, it is going to affect our bottom line. These are challenges we have been facing in the industry, which I believe a couple of other online businesses are also facing.
What are your tips to start an online business?
The first thing is you need to know what you want to sell because your customers want information about the products they want to buy. You also need to identify your scope. Are you going to provide service only within Lagos or a City or are you going to be a trans city business? So, you must look at those key parameters. Critically, I will say things you need to consider when you are setting up the brick and metal stalls are also what you need to consider when you go into online business. Are you going to be able to attract customers to your business? What are you going to offer the customers that will make them stay with you after coming and in the case of online, how are you going to identify your customers from the large pull of online potentials? How do you get your message across to them and, very important at the centre of online is, how do you go about building, operating and optimising your online platform to be able to deliver your business goals?
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How is kara.com.ng faring in the online market?
What I can say is kara.com.ng has not gone down. We have heard stories of online businesses probably at some point, announcing to the world that they are stopping businesses in Nigeria and Africa and I will say for the past six years, we have ensured that we can compete in the space and that, for us, is how far so far we have gone.
As an entrepreneur, what are the lessons you have learnt ?
The primary thing is identifying how you are going to ensure you deliver on your promises to your customers, that is the centre of the entrepreneurial journey. Apart from looking for capital and getting human resources to work for you, situating a place to run your business and getting the products you want to sell and identifying your pricing and other business strategies are very important. But all those without customers will just amount to efforts down the drain.
What is your growing up like?
Growing up was interesting and wonderful. I can say whatever we have achieved in kara.com.ng today started from when I was a young child. My mum was involved in trading and I used to help her in the trading activities. Later on, I got myself involved in trading items from my secondary school days to the university level. I have been selling to earn an income. That is what I have been doing for close to 30 years now. I had the opportunity of being educated as well from primary to secondary and higher institution. I have worked at the Computer Village. I learnt how to build a PC and worked on computers. That, for me, is the starting point in my introduction to practical computing activities. Whenever there is a strike or break in school, I go to the Computer Village, get some form of unpaid industrial attachment, just to learn. It has been great. I give praise to Allah for making the journey so far a very good and memorable one.
Are you saying your background in selling of petty things inspired you to set up kara.com.ng?
Yes, it is part of it. You can’t take it out of it. The fact that you have to provide goods and services, even as a young child to your classmates or your friends, realising that you can’t do everything yourself in the course of running this business as child, it played a very important role in influencing starting up kara.com.ng.
What is your advice to Nigerian youths out there?
The key thing is to say every task has got its own process and procedure and it is very important to learn those processes without skipping the learning curve. I know as youths, you want to get results quickly, but at the same time you need to keep an eye on the goal, even when you get to a place where you want to sustain where you are. To do that, you still need a positive attitude and that positive attitude is readiness to always learn; never assume you have known everything.
