NAIROBI: For many consumers, finding bargains or special offers is a large part of the reason the shopping or dining experience is either a lot of fun or a chore.
e-Commerce sites such as Jumia and Olx have helped ease the process, with consumers no longer needing to walk from shop to shop looking for deals.
Kim Muhota, the founder and CEO of Plurro, now hopes to make the shopping experience even more convenient, and is promising merchants better value.
“ Plurro is a mobile-based app that allows consumers and business to leverage on crowd sourcing,” he said.
“For example, if you go to a coffee shop or a clothing store and ask for a discount, you have little bargaining power because there’s just one or two of you.
“However, if you show up with a large group of people, then it becomes a different conversation because the store or restaurant owner is forced to listen to you.”
Plurro uses some elements of group buying — an online marketing solution where users get products and services at significantly reduced prices on the condition that a minimum number of buyers make the same purchase.
Users register on a website and receive regular updates through email and social media on the deals available. The users then share the deal with friends or colleagues until the required number of customers has been registered to activate the discount.
This model has been successful in marketing, mostly middle to high-end discretionary commodities, such as concert tickets, dinners at high-end restaurants, family getaways and spa treatments.
Mr Muhota, however, said Plurro offers a better value proposition to conventional group buying and is especially targeted at SMEs looking to build traction for their stores or restaurants.
“People would seek to draw similarities between our operating model and group buying or deal sites, like Groupon [a US-based e-Commerce site], but Plurro is different on several fronts,” he said.
“In the first place, we are mobile. Consumers download the app, instal it and then they are pretty much good to go, with little intervention from an online administrator.
“Second, it is consumer driven — the consumer decides what special offer or discount they want, and as long as they can build a crowd, they can get it.”
SPECIFIC PROMOTIONS
Muhota said relying on social media ensures that as more consumers sign up for a deal, the discount gets bigger.
“The mobile app is easy to use because it is linked to social media, so users can share deals on Facebook and Twitter and reach out to their friends and build a crowd,” he said.
“We are also building in a WhatsApp integration, and soon a USSD integration to allow consumers who do not have smartphones to also get on board and benefit.”
The app is location-specific, which means merchants can have promotions for specific stores and target consumers who are within a particular radius.
Plurro is, however, not the first attempt at monetising crowd sourcing and group buying in the country. Ushahidi, which was developed in the wake of the 2007-08 post-election violence, allowed users to report incidents of election malpractice around them. The platform has since been adopted to report on various crises across the world.
Last week, Safaricom announced a partnership with Google to launch Waze in the Kenyan market. Waze is a traffic-reporting app that uses crowd-sourced user data and Google Maps to create a continuous loop of traffic information, with reports ranging from roads with traffic jams to accident alerts.
Other attempts to develop group marketing platforms have not been too successful. Mocality Deals and its parent e-Commerce site, Mocality, closed down two years ago after operating for several years without breaking even.
Jumia and Olx are also yet to break even despite heavy marketing budgets and pulling significant traction to their sites.
TECH-DRIVEN ECONOMY
Muhota, who worked for a leading financial firm in the US, launched and sold a start-up before developingPlurro, and is confident his operating model will be successful in Kenya’s increasingly tech-driven economy.
“Crowd sourcing and mobile are both very strong selling points, and Plurro is perfectly straddling both concepts, and this guarantees us traction,” he said.
The platform has no sign-up fees, instead choosing to charge a commission on deals.
“The app is free to download and we do not get the money upfront from either the consumers or the merchants,” Muhota said.
“We monetise it by getting a percentage of the revenues merchants get from the discounts. So if 100 people come in courtesy of Plurro, then you give us 5 per cent of the business they bring in.”
Plurro has been successfully launched in the US, where it is enjoying good traction, with thousands of merchants signed up and tens of thousands of consumers sharing deals and discounts. Kenya is its second location.
“We have big retailers, mid-tier retailers and also SMEs, but we are specially focused on the SMEs,” said Muhota.
“This is because small retailers do not have large marketing budgets for marketing campaigns, so Plurroallows them to get access to consumers around them at an affordable rate.”
-standardmedia.co.ke
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