CEO: Konga rakes N600m from Nigeria’s ‘Black Friday’

Konga, Nigeria’s leading online shopping company has said that its website processed N50 million worth of hourly orders and grossed N600 million during its version of Black Friday for Nigerian consumers.

[su_quote cite=”Sim Shagaya, CEO and founder of Konga.com”]Konga was processing N50 million worth of orders every hour and that Konga sold 500% more items in the two days of Yakata than it did in all of 2012[/su_quote]

Sim Shagaya, CEO and founder of Konga.com, said that this year’s edition of Yakata, its own version of Black Friday created to offer mouth-watering discounts on its products to Nigerian consumers delivered “even more outstanding results”.

According to Shagaya, “on Friday, Konga.com saw a record breaking 1440% year on year increase in online revenue.”

According to a breakdown by the online shopping company, apart from grossing N600 ($3.5m) in the Yakata promo, over N200 million worth of sales were generated for Konga merchants in a single day, while 1,420 orders were delivered on the same day.

Konga said that the sale ushered in “unprecedented traffic, orders and revenue numbers” with its average daily traffic increasing five-fold with 53 per cent and 47 per cent routed through mobile devices and desktops respectively.

Konga said that its Yakata sales started on Thursday and ended by midnight on Black Friday “giving shoppers more time to shop”.

During the period, the online shopper said its recorded 670 per cent increase in new orders from shoppers across every state in Nigeria.

In what it claimed is a Nigerian record, Konga said it reached a peak of 1,659 orders placed within one hour and processed over 100,000 packages during the sales.

The three most loved products from the sale promotion were the Spark Android Tablet, the Infix Zero phone and Polystar 32” LED TV.

The company’s CEO explained in a post-promotions statement that, “Konga’s Yakata sales pioneered and localised the concept of Black Friday in the Nigerian ecommerce industry. The first edition held in 2013 and was a big success. However, the 2014 sales delivered even more outstanding results.”

At the peak of the Yakata sales promotion, “Konga was processing N50 million worth of orders every hour and that Konga sold 500% more items in the two days of Yakata than it did in all of 2012”, according to Shagaya.

He said that the 2014 sales were record-breaking for Konga across different metrics.

“Unlike its closest online retailer competitor, the Konga.com website experienced no down-time during the Yakata sales, despite the incredible number of concurrent visits to the site during that period”, according to the CEO of the online shopping company.