Categories: Startups

A conversation with, Adam Dawood, Country Head of Kaymu Pakistan

Berlin-based Kaymu, with operations in more than 30 countries across the world, completed two successful years in Pakistan a few months ago. The e-commerce website provides sellers including small businesses and manufacturers with a platform to reach out and connect with a multitude of potential buyers.

With the ever growing number of e-commerce ventures in Pakistan, we are finally seeing people trusting and buying online and Kaymu is one of the most visited platforms in Pakistan. Unlike, other e-commerce websites, it provides a platform to set up a shop and start selling. Which means Kaymu has a lot of responsibility on it shoulders. These include keeping a check on sellers to make sure that they are selling legitimate and genuine products, whether the sellers are delivering timely orders and also making sure that the customers are satisfied.

We recently got in touch with country head, Adam Dawood, and tried to learn more about how well the e-commerce portal is operating.

Seller Status on Kaymu

Impressively enough, the number of sellers on the platform has increased up to five times over the last six months. According to Dawood, in 2015 alone, from January to April, the number of sellers has grown to 15,000+. These sellers have listed more than 200,000 items on the website.

An inadvertent consequence of the initial focus of Kaymu.pk on simply acquiring a maximum number of sellers has been the fact that in a lot of cases the quality of the sellers has been overlooked. To address this challenge, Dawood claims, Kaymu has completely revamped its management technique with respect to sellers. He further explained that how Kaymu has closed several sellers account just because they were not responsive and not handling the sales properly.

“We have removed more than 3000 low-quality sellers from Kaymu, in the month of January only.” told Dawood to TechJuice.

Responding to another reservation of the several incidences of the sale of pirated goods, the country manager went on to explain that owing to the massive number of sellers on the website it becomes technically difficult to control all seller activity. However, the platform does keep a check on sellers overall and demands appropriate customer handling. He went on to explain, how Kaymu keeps following up with sellers until the order is shipped, in order to keep the customer happy and satisfied.

Splitting Operations and Seller Management in Kaymu

Addressing TechJuice concern that the focus of Kaymu.pk seems to have been shifted from the quality of sellers to the quantity (a concern that is manifested in the average customer ratings) and also the number he told us, Dawood explained how the organization has split operations into two effective departments: the buyer side (based in Lahore) and the seller side (based in Karachi).“What we have done is created a conflict between the two (sides).”

In dividing operations and bringing forth concerns from both perspectives, the resulting conflict in perspectives enables a better understanding of both seller and buyer customers, Dawood explained. For instance, for a particular case of evaluating a buyer-seller relationship, the seller management side focuses on the performance ratings of sellers such as listings and dispatch ratings. On the other hand, the buyer management side concentrates on the seller performance in terms of their buyers satisfaction. This conflict in turn gives a fair assessment of both categories and helps us make better decisions to ensure the quality of services and customer satisfaction is maintained, Dawood claims.

How Kaymu promotes customer and employee growth?

Besides ensuring that the quality of sellers is maintained, Kaymu.pk also aims to promote a learning environment for both its customers and employees. Towards the customer end, the organization has taken the recent initiative of organizing educational workshops that focus on entrepreneurial opportunities for ordinary people to manufacture and sell goods from home.

This initiative has encouraged regular people to use Kaymu as a platform for selling goods, Dawood explains.

“In fact, one of our sellers is a guy who works as a courier delivery person. He sells lipsticks on Kaymu and is actually doing pretty well. In fact, amazingly well. This guy is leading his category and making tons of money.”

In addition to providing opportunities for the community, Kaymu also provides employees with a learning environment that not only encourages them to perform to the best of their abilities but also pushes them to start their own Kaymu stores.

“I’ll be very happy the day when one of my employee hands me over a resignation because he/she wants to start their own Kaymu store”, Dawood said.

Kaymu vs Daraz

When asked how well Kaymu is competing against the giant buyer-seller platform of Daraz.pk, Adam told TechJuice that the market the two “competitors” cater to are actually very different. While the focus of Daraz.pk is on brands and bigger industries, Kaymu chooses to target small businesses, middlemen, home sellers and manufacturers. Having been a part of Daraz.pk previously, he believes the competition is overall very friendly.

Responding to the rumor of a possible clash between Ahmed Khan, MD Asia Rocket Internet, and him which led Ahmed to resign from the venture, Dawood denied the rumor saying that there was no such thing, they had excellent working relationship and that the two had been in touch multiple times after working together at Rocket Internet.

Ever since its launch Kaymu has played the role of an effective platform in Pakistan’s rapidly growing e-commerce market and claims an impressive growth in the number of daily orders it has been receiving. To help make payment procedure more secure, the portal is currently aiming to get on board the services of the trusted Escrow and PayPal platforms. While the current trajectory of growth is impressive, Kaymu expects greater levels of improvement and aims an increased level of customer satisfaction in the time to come.

Edited by: Sadia Arshad
Image Credits: Kaymu