Online Shopping Uganda: Supaprice wants to be your Ugandan one stop buying and selling destination

supaprice Uganda

Supaprice.co.ug  is an online shopping store in Uganda that wants to be your one-stop shopping destination. They provide a platform for sellers to showcase their products and services and for buys to shop from an extensive list of sellers. The products range from Fashion items, electronics, household items, cars to property and real estate. The platform allows sellers to post free ads which then form the extensive list of sellers in the network. I am not sure if Supaprice takes a commission of each successful sale via it’s platform

The convenience of online shopping  is in the fact that all of this can be done in the comfort of your home with an internet enabled device. Julius Magala Superprice CEO says that;

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Our goal, is to provide you with a one stop shopping destination with an extensive product range, competitive prices, exceptional services including paying in installments – where applicable, door to door delivery and an easy and convenient platform to shop or market your products.

At a time when online shopping and internet businesses are blooming in Uganda, we hope to see a fully developed online shopping eco-system with online business bottlenecks removed.  Rocket internet has invested heavily in African internet startups like Hellofood, Lamudi, Kaymu, jumia, Jovago among others. These will potentially spark the growth and interest in online shopping on the continent. Countries like Nigeria have more developed eco-systems with a bigger majority of the population shopping online.

On a curious note, Supaprice Uganda is independent of Supaprice.co.uk yet they share a name. I am wondering if they took time to think about their branding. What this means that it’s going to be twice as hard to have an online presence as an internet startup since the UK Supaprice appears when you Google Supaprice. it goes without saying that all the Social media handles were taken as well.

The bigger concern at this point is whether startups like Supaprice can survive given the competition from Rocket Internet’s babies who raise millions of dollars in series A funding.

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4 thoughts on “Online Shopping Uganda: Supaprice wants to be your Ugandan one stop buying and selling destination

  1. Hi Onyait, I am Julius, the CEO of Supaprice Uganda. Thanks for the post. It is much appreciated. The branding issue is not insurmountable. Interestingly, as I am based in the UK, we are already seeing this working to our advantage in some aspects.

    More interesting is your question whether startups like ourselves can compete against the likes of Jumia, Kaymu etc. The overwhelming answer is YES, otherwise why bother???!!!

    From your comment, I am assuming you have not run a significant business before.

    If you had, you would have picked out that irrespective of how much money you have, as a business you can only survive by meeting the needs of your target customers – and doing it profitably.

    Here in west, you will find plenty of examples to illustrate what I am talking about. Simply google “dotcom bubble companies”.

    In the east, read through Alibaba’s fight against Ebay. Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba has even written a book and made a movie out of this episode.

    Closer to home, I suggest your review previous startups like mocality in Kenya, Kalahari etc and understand why they failed after having spent millions of dollars in the market.

    I think you will gather some interesting insights.

    Bottom line …. yes money makes a difference however in the final analysis, we are strongly focused on meeting our customer’s needs and doing it profitably. We will certainly be profitable by end of this year.

    So for a six month startup, we are not doing bad at all, thank you!!

    @David – I think the above research will serve you well. This is not theory. This is real business my friend.

    • I just visited SuperPrice.co.ug and what i have liked about their website is the simplicity (uncluttered), that makes it easy to navigate for an average local internet user.

    • Mr. CEO, my 2 cents here.

      Your argument reminds me of the classical study in Economics. Why small firms co-exist along big firms. Sure a briefcase company could be making enough and satisfying its clients to a larger extent.

      But let’s refocus, welcome to startup land, the scramble an partition for the pie of the internet business is back. The market is so novel that even a high school student in their college dorm has an equal chance at beating the behemoths that continue to scavenge the internetz. Therefore, you, Supaprice relegating selves to a comfortable small ‘startup’ is a clear lack of ambition and firm comprehension of the startup tenets — having a repeatable and scalable model. Or in Zuck’s speak — moving fast and breaking things.

      Of failed e-commerce products especially in Africa, one word: MONEY. They usually have less of it to carry out aggressive user acquisition campaigns save for the tonnes of faith they have that they’ll break even. They forget that the code (shiny looking apps) are the easy bit. Well, they know but figuring out how to take the campaign offline is another hurdle.

      Kalahari a la Takealot merger, or the acquisition of Uganda’s garimoja by cheki (One Africa Media), the death of Mocality, or Meka are few among the many e-commerce startups that have blossomed, rose our hopes but hit the rock bottom in a couple tens of months. Now, the reasons of their demise are not totally known, but you’ll always hear; Rocket Internet, One Africa Media, Spark, Naspers in the mix. The laboratory experiments were carried out in Asia and Eastern Europe, the frontier markets have been figured out. That’s is why there is an endless stream of dollars being pumped in the e-commerce startup scene. America will always accuse them of R&D, Rip off & Duplicate, but it’s okay. These accelerator/VC colossus have figured out the missing part of the jigsaw, convince and convince prospective clients some more. And some more.

      Undeniably, I respect your hustle, the resolve to run a startup. An e-commerce startup. I respect that you have studied the market, Jack Ma’s war with eBay. Amazon’s predicament in India amongst many other cases.

      But as it boils down, it comes back to context. Let’s stop the arm-chair analysis. Come back to ground 101, the offline world where the narrative will be re-written. It’s an open court.

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