The Covid-19 pandemic will have many lasting impacts on society; one is how people find and buy goods. As more people shift to remote work, they can no longer stop at the stores as they did on the evening commutes on their way home. Predictably, sellers are now turning to the internet, especially social media, to reach new customers and compensate for the decrease of in-person shoppers. This trend has dramatically increased mobile money adoption as it enables buyers to pay instantly while being remote. After making a payment, customers expect sellers to provide delivery options since going to the store is often not justified. Unfortunately, most sellers were unprepared to meet those expectations when the pandemic started. Some chose to use independent motorbike drivers to send goods to buyers while others went beyond to hire full-time delivery drivers. Working with independent motorbike drivers, who typically carry passengers, however, poses a few risks. First, there is potential damage to the packages due to the lack of proper delivery equipment. Second, the end customer experience is unpredictable because the professionalism of independent delivery drivers can vary significantly. Finally, with full-time delivery drivers, delivery costs can get out of control quickly as most businesses do only a handful to a dozen deliveries per day. Vanoma (formerly Nisawa) was launched in January 2021 to fill this gap and has already amassed an impressive list of business partners. The company’s initial goal was to enable businesses to send goods quickly and reliably to their customers at an affordable price. Since its launch, the company has created technology tools to make the delivery experience as smooth as possible. For instance, using Vanoma’s website, sellers can request deliveries in under two minutes and track the progress thanks to real-time notifications. These tools save sellers time as they do not have to call asking when a delivery driver will be arriving or whether a package has been delivered. Vanoma has also invested in a fleet of full-time delivery drivers with suitable delivery equipment to ensure buyers always receive their packages in perfect condition. Those drivers are also trained to adhere to strict professional conduct so that buyers consistently have a good delivery experience. Vanoma works with a wide variety of businesses, from fashion and specialty stores to supermarkets and mom and pop shops. The founders of Vanoma want to go beyond the delivery service. “Besides offering reliable delivery options, most sellers want to increase their online presence and sales,” said Anselme Mucunguzi, co-founder and CEO of Vanoma. “The typical process of paying Rwf500,000 or more to have an eCommerce site, however, is not something most small businesses are comfortable with,” he added. In addition, when creating an online store for the first time, sellers typically do not know for sure what they need. Consequently, they usually pay the initial cost to find later that the final eCommerce site cannot, for example, support online payments or show up in Google search results. “Sadly, when that happens, sellers have to pay more money to have those capabilities. You can understand how costly that can get. As a technology company already working with sellers, we want to address this problem,” said Theophile Nsengimana, Chief technical Officer and co-founder of Vanoma. Vanoma is currently building a platform that will enable any seller to create a unique eCommerce store within a couple of hours by using drag-and-drop features. Unlike existing solutions, each seller will have a unique website name, e.g. www.mystore.rw, hence, direct access to their customers. Anselme adds that the online stores will have payments and social media integrations and other tools such as analytics. In addition, he mentions that they are optimizing the online stores to show in the top search engine results when customers are googling items to buy. “Our goal is to provide all the technology tools sellers need to run an online store successfully and make that as affordable as possible,” he explained. That is an ambitious goal, but the team says they have already made significant progress. Anselme and Theophile are former Rwandan Presidential Scholars. They graduated from Groupe Scolaire Officiel de Butare (GSOB Indatwa) and Ecole de Science de Musanze, respectively, in 2010. They completed their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States, where they worked in leading technology companies as software engineers. They are now dedicating their time to Vanoma and plan to expand to other countries soon.
