Safaricom’s Masoko Cuts off 3rd Party Vendors, Feels So ‘Empty’

Masoko is Safaricom’s foray into the highly competitive world of e-commerce. It was launched way back in 2017 and it was the telco’s serious commitment of having vertical integration on its ecosystem.

Masoko strategy involved vendors signing up with them so that they could market their products on their site. The company admitted that it did not take off as expected since some vendors were skeptical of leaving their brick and mortal approach.

Well, that vendor system is no more. According to Tech-ish, an official email dated 5th November was sent to vendors that notified them of the discontinuation of the service.

Two years ago we set out on a journey to open an online market place for Kenyan entrepreneurs.

During this journey we provided you with an opportunity to sell products on our platform. Together, we challenged ourselves along the way and learnt important lessons.

To build on these learnings and prepare to serve you better in the future, we are making changes on our marketplace, which will among others, see a reduction on number of products available on sale in our platform. Consequently, this is to notify you that your products are amongst those affected and therefore we will not offer your products for sale within the next 7 days.

We will reach out to you to handle any returns arising from sales made during this transition period, and share closing reconciliations on your account. Kindly raise any queries or concerns related to your account to [email protected] by 30^th November, 2019.

Thank you for the partnership that we have had with you. We will keep your contacts with us and promise to get in touch should we require to increase the range of products on offer.

If you login to Masoko right now, you will notice the huge reduction in the number of products offered. Masoko looks like an online Safaricom shop where you can buy smartphones or smartphone accessories like how you’d do it on a physical Safaricom shop.

This move also comes after Safaricom made a change on how we view them, from dropping the Twaweza slogan for Simple, Transparent and Honest. The change in strategy could have made the management rethink Masoko and this could be the result.