Valentine's Special Feature: Kenyan Online Company Offers Convenient Solutions

Kumekucha discovered an interesting site that may be of great use to our readers during all this Valentine's madness. I interviewed Victoria Muiruri (pictured below).




Who is Gift Solutions?

Gift Solutions is an online Gift Store serving the Kenyan market by providing memorable gifts for all occasions. We are located in View Park Towers, 16th floor in Nairobi

What do you have specifically planned for this Valentine's at the site?

For Valentines’ Day, being the day for lovers to celebrate their love in the most romantic way, Gift Solutions has a wide array of romantic gifts that lovers can send to the people they treasure. We have both the traditional Valentine’s day gifts such as flowers, chocolates, fine wines and gift hampers but we have also gone further to offer those who prefer gifts that will be remembered long after February a selection of gifts too. Here we have engravable/customizable gifts that recipients will treasure for a long time as they ca be engraved with special messages of love, customized with the recipients name or even better still, bear photos of the couple engraved on the gift. A complete list of Valentines’ Day offering can be found here

For those stuck for words, we also have some romantic Valentines’ poems posted on our website together with a history of the origins of Valentines Day.

Give us a brief history of this site and what inspired you to launch it.

Gift Solutions was started as a pioneer in the local e-commerce field to enable Kenyans purchase products online from the comfort of their offices and homes. While we have successfully served our customers through email catalogs, we felt it was time to offer all Kenyans wherever they may be a chance to view our product offering and order from us. Our website, www.giftsolutions.co.ke was launched in November 2006 and has received an overwhelming response from Kenyans especially those in the Diaspora. We now deliver not only to Nairobi but also to other major towns in Kenya.

Where do most of your e-commerce sales at this site come from?

Because our site caters mostly for resident Kenyans, we find that most of our customers are persons working in and around Nairobi. This is mainly for anniversaries, birthdays, Get Well gifts and also increasingly a lot of corporate customers. Our second largest customer base is Kenyans abroad and lastly Kenyans based in other major Kenyan towns.

How do you market the site?

Our site is marketed through online banner advertising eg. on popular Kenyan websites with lots of traffic such as Property.co.ke. We also do a major email campaign to our customers around major occasions such as Valentines Day, Mothers Day and Xmas. We have also ventured in sms market to take advantage of emerging trends in marketing. Word of mouth also plays a major role in marketing Gift Solutions as new customers are referred by satisfied customers and also satisfied recipients order from us. We also had a full feature article on Gift Solutions in December on the Daily Nation and this helped us reach a wider client base across Kenya.

How do most of your first time visitors/clients find you currently?

We get a lot of repeat business from our existing clientele as they appreciate the special effort we put in to make their gifts as memorable as possible. However, new business also comes in from people referred to us, people who have seen our gifts when we deliver eg to offices and also customers who found us on the web.

What's your vision for this site?

We aim to be the Amazon.com of Kenya. We want to take advantage of the acceptance of the Internet by more and more Kenyans as a tool of business and not just for sending and receiving emails. More and more people have realized just how convenient the Internet is when it comes to letting other people do the running around for you as you sit in your office. We currently have close to 200 different gift items on our site and we hope to have thousands in the near future. We also aim to serve our customers better by introducing credit card payment systems which are as yet a major problem for African e-commerce.

Any other details

We are proud to have introduced some unique features to our clientele notably our Gift Reminder system. This allows a user to come to our site, enter all the important dates like birthdays, anniversaries etc that come up in the year and happily sit back without fearing that they might remember when its too late. Our online systems will then remind the user via email when the date approaches so that they can have enough time to buy the gifts they want.

Our Order Tracking feature that allows a customer to login and find out whether the gift has been delivered is also an innovative feature on our site, not to mention our Gift Voucher sending and multiple currency shopping experience.

Shoppers on our site can shop by occasion, recipient or category and can also shop by price to find gifts that suit their budget. We have gifts from as low as ksh. 500 to over ksh. 12,000 for those who want to make a memorable statement.