SF-based Yelp.com helps users connect to the best restaurants, shops, nightclubs among others. Kenya’s Vyura.com is launching to offer similar services with a slight tweak.
Vyura wants to be the best place to find, discover, share and buy products with friends from your local stores and saving you time and money in return.
Set to launch soon in Nairobi, Vyura, Swahili for Frogs aims to help users take adavantage of online information to find deals and offers on items befoe they shop.
The team believes that before internet, shoppers used to go to friends and relatives to ask them the best item to buy and from what shop and at what price but since most shops are getting online and the family is broken due to urbanization, Vyura come in.
“Vyura is a social shopping platform that connects shoppers to products, stores and fellow shoppers. They can easily find and discover new products, share and recommended products to their friends while earning points which they can redeem on the site for discounts, gifts and other great rewards,” the team says on their site.
The team aims to take away the pain shoppers go through when they realize that the shop is online, there’s no information about the prices and availability of most of its products or services. Majority of shops also only put their location and contact details-information that is not helpful for budgeting. Most times, stores even have no contact information anywhere, not even on their social media accounts.
“Assumption two is that you have the store’s number readily available, which is most often not the case. Trying to get the store’s contact information online often leads you back to square one. The only reliable way to get the information is going physically to the store which is inconvenient and a huge time waster since you will probably have to visit several stores before getting the exact product that you are looking for,” the team writes.
Vyura therefore aims to take advantage of the rapid penetration of Internet to help shoppers have access to more choice and have access to accurate information and product reviews and product recommendations from people they trust, their own friends.
