com·mu·ni·ty
/kəˈmyo͞onədē/
noun noun: community; plural noun: communities
A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
“Konga has a healthy community”

Before I begin, I’ll like to state that communities are the bedrock of marketplaces. Simple.

December last year, I took up the responsibility to build an online community forum for Konga’s over 12,000 merchants and thousands of customers. What got me really excited about this project was the fact that I had an opportunity to build a seamless tool that will consolidate and facilitate all discussion needs for both our merchants and customers. I knew from the start that this was going to be a business redefining project.

Online community forums for marketplaces aren’t new — Etsy, Shopify, Amazon and Ebay — all run their own forum. You may wonder, but why is this a big deal? I’ll explain. In today’s world, managing communication, passing information and gathering feedback from a large number of people in a well structured and controlled manner is fast becoming a huge challenge. While sending and receiving emails are great, responding to individual complaints based on those emails quickly becomes unwieldy. You will need an entire team to handle this task. This is where a forum shines. It fills this void. A forum offers you a tool that allows you tap into the minds of your consumers.

An announcement. Forum users can’t comment. They only read.

Advantages of a community forum
1.) Moderation is a lot easier
2.) You can make references to solutions for problems already solved
3.) Consolidation of messages is easier - you almost don’t have to police your users across other platforms. They know where to pour out their grievances in cases of gripe
4.) You own the platform, you set the rules.

While there exist platforms that achieve the same goal like a forum, Facebook groups being a classical example, a forum presents an uncluttered medium and helps your users focus on one single goal; share their experiences.

Interesting discoveries
Konga’s users, both merchants and customers had issues and legitimate ones at that. A community forum was long overdue. They needed to be heard. Merchants and customers openly air their opinions, ask questions, find solutions to challenges faced by other merchants and customers and they also proffer solutions to other people’s problems. This platform, with almost no advertisement, took on a life of its own.

When we launched self-fulfil (a service that allows merchants deliver items by themselves, essentially bypassing third party logistics companies), one of the biggest request we got from merchants was a way to offer free delivery on an item(SKU) level. Our initial plan and concept were to offer this feature on a store level, our assumption was wrong. Merchants quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work for them. They wanted a way to indicate what item was eligible for free shipping. They pushed hard for this feature. We listened to them and gave them what they wanted, what happened next was really remarkable, merchants daily orders shot up by approximately 300%.

Free delivery tags on products

The number of inbound complaints we have had to deal with has gone down significantly as merchants and buyers willingly, out of their own volition, proffer solutions to challenges faced by other merchants and customers.

Inbound questions from merchants

Request for complimentary services like content uploading, copy writing and photography services grew significantly.

A photography request

The Road Ahead
The community, in such a short span, has grown to become an integral tool to both the merchants and customers and Konga as a company. A tool that allows them express themselves. No doubt, the ideas and suggestions offered here will contribute in shaping the product road map of the company. New business strategies and services not thought of today will emerge from this place. This is the wisdom of the crowd at play here albeit we have had to deal with scathing remarks and criticism.

Ultimately, the tips and tricks, questions and answers, dos and don’ts that are shared here will go on to build an invaluable resource for both new and existing customers and merchants alike. This essentially will become our FAQ portal for all things marketplace.

eCommerce is a nascent industry in Nigeria and Africa at large. The only way to bolster this industry is to create avenues that will encourage transparency. Online communities, amongst other things, are one of the ways to bring the much-needed transparency to this industry.

eCommerce is hard and it is even harder when you are building it in an emerging market like Nigeria. There isn’t any blueprint to follow, no manual. Nothing exist literally. Without a doubt, one of the ways in which we will build a formidable eCommerce ecosystem is when we harness the collective knowledge of our customers, this can only be achieved when we offer them a tool that can allows them share their experiences from interacting with our services. In the end, we exist to serve our customers and merchants. This is why we come to work daily. Serving our users — merchants and customers — is our sole mission. Our North star.

On the side, there are a couple of companies that can make use of community forums; Truppr, allow users to initiate a conversation around fitness and health tips. Andela - Allow fellows and prospective ones to initiate conversations around technical questions and sharing their Andela experience, Jekalo and Gomyway - Allow drivers and commuters to share their ride sharing experiences.

Finally, marketplaces and communities aren’t mutually exclusive. Societies thrive because of the healthy communities we have been able to build and cultivate over the years. This ideology holds true for institutions alike.

I'll love to hear from you

Do you want to say hello? Email me - celestineomin@gmail.com

I tweet at @cyberomin