Ecommerce giant Konga, today announced it sold products worth N3.5 billion during its Black Friday shopping event dubbed Yakata 2016 thus making it the company’s biggest shopping period in its four year history.
In a statement, Konga said it processed 155,000 orders totalling N3.5bn within the sales period. The company said Yakata 2016 has become the busiest Black Friday on record for the online retailer, with marketplace orders up by 400% on 2015’s equivalent shopping period. At its peak, the ecommerce site was processing around 1,200 orders per hour, with the company also recording a 100% increase in the use of Konga Pay, reflecting its customers’ trust in the company.
Konga CEO Shola Adekoya, says, “Yakata 2016 has exceeded all of our expectations in terms of sales; we had been cautiously optimistic that we would improve on last year’s period, but with the Nigerian economy as it currently is, we had been conservative with our projections. However, it seems that there are hundreds of thousands of savvy shoppers keen to make their Naira go a little bit further at the moment, hence they came to Konga to find the very best deals.
“In particular, we saw that sales of Home & Kitchen products were particularly strong this year. During the sales period, our tech team was able to keep the site fully optimized and up and running for the entire duration of the sale, with no outages at all. This resulted in a 67% increase in customers placing orders. Yakata sees the biggest surge of traffic to the Konga marketplace platform each year, so we are proud of all of the Konga team’s commitment in ensuring the platform worked effectively, and delivered a great user experience for our customers”.
The company also reports that mobile continues to be Konga customers’ tool of choice when placing orders, with 76% of orders coming via mobile, compared to just 24% via desktop. This was thanks, in part, to Konga’s newest initiative, ‘KongaEZ’, a newly launched, progressive web application that provides users with a lite version of Konga’s website that loads fast even on slower, 2G network connections, therefore drastically reducing the amount of data used by shoppers, whilst maintaining a great user experience.