Safaricom’s ecommerce venture, Masoko has had quite a tumultous journey. It started off well. It started off well with the promise of being backed by Kenya’s biggest company by market capitalization and was going for Jumia’s jugular.
In November, Safaricom decided to make a radical decision where they cut off 3rd party vendors. This essentially made the site feel like an online Safaricom shop and we wondered what they were planning for the platform.
We thought it was dead until Safaricom decided to gave a complete revamp of the site last month. The new changes brought a new user interface but still offered a limited number of products.
Interesting enough, Safaricom also introduced an app for the ecommerce platform during the same period. It is available on both Android and iOS and it has the same look and feel as the web version. I will show screenshots of the Android version since this is the one that I have currently.
The app is pretty straightforward and I like that. It has five tabs: Home, Account, Category, Help and Cart.
Home tab displays the products that are available on the ecommerce store. You can scroll along to see what is on offer.
The account tab has provision to sign up or login to the service. Also on this tab, you can view your orders & returns, chat, view your wishlist, send feedback, check your n otifications, support, rate and share the app and so on.
The category tab allows you to hone down on what you are looking for easily. Currently I can only see 3 categories: Mobile phones, accessories and tablets.
The Help tab also has another chat functionality, calling functionality and access to Masoko’s official social networking accounts. You can also read the FAQs and terms & conditions in this section too. It is interesting to note that they decided to denote Instagram as “Insta” and Facebook with a capital B at the middle (who knows).
The Carts tab shows what is currently available in your cart, nothing new there.
This app is a nice complement to the main website and it would be great if they added more content for sale on Masoko. We will see how Masoko will perform this year after being given a breath of fresh air in December.
