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In 2018, the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS), conducted an operation in Kampala. It raided two prominent malls; Energy Centre and Light Centre Arcade. The majority of the shops in these two malls sell electronics. At the end of its operation, UNBS concluded that 80% of all electronics sold were counterfeit.
This is not surprising. One common feature of e-commerce in Uganda is the phenomenon aptly summarized as, “what you ordered vs what you received”. To change this, Stephen Obeli Someday founded Kweli.shop, an e-commerce startup that has made it a goal to sell only genuine electronics.
“We have a 100% success rate when it comes to selling genuine electronics. No customer has ever bought any counterfeit electronics from Kweli.shop”, Stephen tells me in an interview. “We have about 48 customer reviews on TrustPilot, about 25 customer reviews on Google and 10 on Facebook. You can look through them and you will never find the word counterfeit anywhere.”
Selling only genuine electronics has borne fruit for Kweli.shop. The startup has over 1,000 regular paying customers and amasses over 10,000 website visits a month. It has also signed a deal with the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) giant, Lipalater Uganda to sell their electronics in instalments of up to 12 months.
“When I reached out to Lipalater, they told me they were looking for us. They were looking for us because they had customers who were sending them products on Kweli.shop that they wanted to purchase. You know, the customer wants what the customer wants!”, says Stephen with a smile. This is the culmination of the work that Kweli.shop has put in, in establishing itself as the place to get genuine electronics.
But how has Kweli.shop been able to succeed with its genuine electronics offering in a sea of counterfeits? To understand this, we need to understand the story of Kweli.shop and Stephen.
Stephen studied Real Estate Management and Valuation at the Entebbe Survey School, but this wasn’t his first choice. “I wanted to be a computer person. That was my passion. But it turns out my parents and brothers didn’t understand. So after Senior Six, I had to do something that they understood and appreciated. So I went to Survey School.”.
Stephen used his time in survey school to learn graphics which became his trade. He also mastered building websites and digital marketing. He incorporated a digital marketing agency in 2016 called Dream Star Digital Ltd which became the parent company of Kweli.shop.
Kweli.shop was birthed when Stephen moved out of his brother’s house. Moving into his own home, he needed appliances. To buy appliances, Stephen turned to Game and Shoprite but by the time he beat the evening jam, he would find them closed. He also looked into getting appliances from downtown, but counterfeits reigned supreme in that part of town.
“I thought I should start a business where customers could shop genuine electronics and it wasn’t limited by location or time. I convinced a few friends to join me.” In November 2018, we did our market research and built the website the following year. “We started building Kweli.shop, the e-commerce platform properly”. Kweli is a hybrid. It is a third-party marketplace where some vendors sell their wares, but the majority of the products are procured and sold by Kweli.shop to end users and retailers.
So how has Kweli.shop ensured only genuine products are sold. “The thing about counterfeits can be broken down into two; someone can set up a factory just to make counterfeits, and then, someone can decide that they will get the right product and manipulate it then put it into the market,” says Stephen.
“So when we discovered that, we decided to make sure that the different corners through which the counterfeit products pass to get to the market, is what we are going to protect customers from.” So Kweli finds the best possible connection to the original manufacturer. They make sure to procure directly from the original manufacturer, but if that isn’t possible, Kweli.shop procures from the official authorized distributor of the original manufacturer.
For third parties, you can only sell on Kweli.shop if you are the authorized distributor or reseller of the original manufacturer. “That is how we make sure that the products our customers buy on Kweli.shop are genuine.”
In 2022, Kweli.shop decided to scale. “We know that when customers order products, they want them to be genuine and they want to receive communication on delivery and there are no additional costs. We planned to spend two months or three preparing our systems for scale and hired a growth manager. But it took us almost a full year to iterate many things. This is why we include things like credit now, to focus on growing the customer numbers.”
Kweli.shop has been funded through a combination of personal capital, bootstrapping and a few loans. “We joined the Growth Africa Accelerator, but you actually pay to join. It is a great accelerator, and when we start raising, they are a valuable resource for investors”.
“Uganda’s e-commerce market is one of the most promising in Africa and its growth comes with a boosted potential to be a tool every consumer can use to deal with the issue of counterfeits on their own. However, a lot more needs to be done by e-commerce players to prove to consumers that e-commerce can, and should be trusted for it to make a significant impact. “, Stephen concludes.