Kilimall tackles e-commerce success with the help of Huawei Cloud

The largest e-commerce platform in East Africa, Kilimall is harnessing the dynamism of Huawei CLOUD to enrich and empower millions of lives in the horn of Africa.

“We are looking forward to using digital transformation to build a better Africa,” said Yang Tao, CEO and founder of Kilimall.

In 2021, Huawei Cloud and Kilimall entered into a partnership which would see the online platform use the cloud to scale their business and accelerate the functioning of the website, improving its customer centric value. Kilimall was launched in 2014 and currently operates in three countries, Kenya where it is based, Uganda and Nigeria.

The e-commerce platform has been experiencing exponential growth and has product offerings that include various categories such as electronics, smart phones, clothing, home accessories, furniture, appliances, makeup and more. Kilimall’s goals have been to offer its clientele simplicity, convenience and variety.

The range of services are designed to ensure optimum levels of convenience and customer satisfaction with the retail process; order delivery-tracking, dedicated customer service support and many other premium services. The company is highly customer-centric and are committed towards finding innovative ways of improving the customers' shopping experience.

With this in mind, Huawei Cloud created a cloud solution which would take into account the large volume of people accessing both the website and app. In addition, Kilimall’s clientele are mainly African with the services developed in China but deployed in Kenya and the continent at large.

Why Huawei Cloud?

According to Peter Guthrie, director of logistics at Kilimall, their development team developed services based on Scrum, splits services, and deploys services on containers. They found that by working with Huawei, they could enjoy a faster response time at 5 minutes for customer needs and 30 minutes for the business at large. “This has facilitated a smooth transition for us as our business has become more effective and has been able to scale efficiently. Our warehouse logistics are also connected to the cloud, which has been excellent for our operations,” said Guthrie.

How Huawei Cloud helped

The Huawei cloud team recommended a high-performance, reliable, and enterprise-level container application management services based on Kubernetes. Further, Distributed Cache Service (DCS) is used to accelerate applications and deliver exceptional read/write performance. The cloud strategy also included the deployment to data centres around the world to reduce the access delay in East Africa. This would also enable Kilimall to leverage off Huawei’s nodes around the world, offering a platform for customers to migrate their systems to the cloud and expand their services in the future.

Stone He, President of Huawei Cloud Southern Africa region said Kilimall’s expansion through Africa using the cloud was a pivotal moment in the history of the company.

“To be part of the largest e-commerce platform in east Africa is monumental. This is a display of our ethos, to be diligent, inspiring and to take the cloud to the continent in the most detailed, value orientated and focused way possible.”