On February 23rd Jumia Kenya announced a new phone available on their online store. You see, of late they have decided to move to the approach of partnering with product vendors directly to sell their wares like they would in a brand store. Basically, Jumia takes the whole thing like they are distributor, retailer and marketer. What it does is it takes the costs down in that there is less brick and mortar and customers can shop online without needing to move physically. That’s convenient.
So Infinix is one such vendor that sells on Jumia. There are others, including Microsoft which recently came in with their Lumia devices starting with Lumia 435. I decided to take the plunge, instead of just write about it like other media. You know, experience it like the average user would. I have heard of numerous cases of sad stories in the shopping experience, so I was ready for anything. I wasn’t going to tell them, lest they treat me special just because they knew who I was. Used my personal gmail account and hit the road.
Setting up an account is easy, you of course first search for the product you want, select options like colour, number of pieces if you need to and hit add to cart. I thought this next step was going to be a nightmare, but it wasn’t. Signing up to pay is just as easy as filling in your details for shipping, same to be used to fill your account. They have payment options as follows: cash on delivery (they ask you to be ready with the exact amount), credit card and Paypal. You won’t need a password at this point, in fact all through the first shopping experience.
So I filled in my details and paid via PayPal. In total, you get 7 emails in during the process, these include one to get you to set up a password, another to alert you that your order has been confirmed and much later when they have the stock item ready for shipping, alerting you that your order has been processed. Okay, the 7 emails include the PayPal receipt. So I got a call the next day after shopping, that’s on 24th of February with a lady alerting me that my order had been confirmed and that I will be updated when status changes to shipping. She was nice, though not as nice as the ones on the TV commercials. She told me that my order would be processed anywhere from 3-7 days.
I was hoping it was going to be in 3 days as I was supposed to fly out to Barcelona on Saturday, a trip that would be a whole week, and this would mean that I’d have to delegate the process. There is an option to track the order, but since it’s less than 5 KMs from Jumia Office to my office I didn’t see the need. I maybe would have done it had there been delays.
Saturday mid-morning I got a call, this time by a man, I assume it’s the guy on the TV commercial who does the delivery. Told me that he was on his way with the delivery. There were people in the office then, I don’t usually go anywhere on travel day, so I told them in a text who to deliver it to.
The lady who collected it told me when the delivery guy came in, she was asked to sign with a finger on the delivery app and she was left with the package. It was only an invoice and the phone inside a sealed plastic bag. No warranty document or physical receipt, so all I have as proof of ownership is the invoice and an email stating that my order had been confirmed. I don’t know yet how warranty is handled on Jumia and would want to know as that’s important.
Otherwise I would consider the experience as good, the device is now with our team for review, the Infinix Hot Note, a rather large 5.5 inch device. Look out for the first hands on preview and later on a full review. What do you think about the shopping experience?
