With over 1.1 billion people, Africa’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is exploding and E-commerce is exponentially increasing proportions of or the interest of some giants settle a massively. But online payment such as credit cards in Africa are not so popular.
The fundamental problem in the African market is that over 80% of its population is unbanked (so can not make purchases online) and just 7% of people who have internet and bank cards are buying online, which reduces considerably fields of action of the actors of e-commerce. The good news in all this is that over 70% of the African population has at least one mobile phone each, making it a potential of over 800 million users.
Telcos such as Safaricom in Kenya, so this opportunity and set up mobile payment solutions such as M-PESA (which is the most popular Mobile money solution in the world). Virtually all Kenyans use it to pay bills, make local purchases and transfer money from one mobile to another without the need to have a credit card or even a bank account.
It is then that INFINITY SPACE , a tech startup based in Cameroon with operations in Kenya, France and England, which has developed, WeShopUp, an e-commerce site that couples Crowdfunding and online shopping for allowing users to form groups in their purchases thereby allowing them to get very large discounts.
Only a month after the official opening e-commerce site, customers flocked around the world. The site recorded purchases from Europe, America, Asia and much of Africa. After only 24 hours of launch, the amount of sales made only in Cameroon already amounted to € 1,000 (equivalent to 655 957FCFA) Despite that many customers have complained of wanting to make purchases but that participatory they did not have a credit card or PayPal account.
To go even further so that break geographical boundaries, the team at INFINITY SPACE,the holding that owns WeShopUp,recently integrated the mobile payment system M-PESA on the marketplace to allow any user of the mobile payment platform M-PESA in Kenya, shopping with his family and pay with their mobile without a credit card.
“The integration of M-PESA into WeShopUp will help a significant number of users to shop online with their mobile without having to send money to someone who has a credit card, “says Miss Mercy Orangi, Head of Mobile Technologies in INFINITY SPACE Kenya:” We hope to increase the volume of our sales and offer new opportunities to those who need it most, notament in areas removed from Africa and around the world. We started with M-PESA, and this is only the beginning of the beginning! “
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