At 5,892 meters above sea level, Mount Kilimanjaro is known as the "roof of Africa". Kilimall, a Chinese cross-border e-commerce platform named after Mount Kilimanjaro, is working to create a new peak in Africa's e-commerce sector.
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In the past 8 years, "I" have been very good in Africa
Africa, the new e-commerce market, is rapidly emerging. It is estimated that by 2025, the overall size of the African e-commerce market will reach 75 billion US dollars, and there are as many as 1.3 billion potential e-commerce consumers. Founded in July 2014 in Nairobi, Kenya, Kilimall is the first Asian enterprise to enter the African Internet industry, and the only overseas local + Chinese cross-border e-commerce platform in China, committed to building a one-stop international online transaction service platform integrating multinational orders, transactions, payments, delivery and other functions. Today, Kilimall has become Africa's largest B2C export platform, with monthly sales of 300,000 sellers growing by 300% year-on-year, a repurchase rate of up to 60%, and an average unit price of $30, making it a trusted and favorite shopping channel for African consumers.
Yang Tao, founder and CEO of Kilimall
"We are positioned as 'enablers of digital business in Africa.'" Yang Tao, founder and CEO of Kilimall, said, "Our core product is the Kili E-business Enabling Suite, which covers e-commerce transactions as well as fulfillment, payment, after-sales and big data. ”
In 2014, when Kilimall first started his business in Africa, the overall infrastructure in Africa was relatively backward, there were almost no third-party companies to cooperate, and problems such as payment and logistics needed to be solved by Kilimall. It is under such difficult conditions that Kilimall has used 8 years to break out of its own piece of the sky, with the most efficient and lowest theft rate warehouse in Africa, which can support same-day delivery of orders, and has created about 10,000 jobs in Africa, covering logistics, express delivery, customer service, local sellers, etc.
When Yang Tao introduced the development of the company to the author, it was not in distant Africa, but in the company's office in Changsha. Although he himself did not supervise the field in Africa, the company's business remained efficient and smooth. This is all because the company has built an advanced digital system that connects nearly 10,000 people upstream and downstream of African e-commerce to achieve collaboration.
Why does Kilimall rely so heavily on an e-commerce support suite like Kili E-business Enabling Suite? Simply put, it is because in Africa, the transaction risk and cost are high, and the transaction efficiency is low, and the transaction experience (including sales, logistics, etc.) is poor. Kilimall brings to Africa not only an e-commerce trading platform, but also a commercial civilization. Kilimall tries to redefine the trust and trading experience of transactions in Africa through its own efforts, reduce channel costs, improve efficiency, help more Chinese companies enter the African market, and also allow more African consumers to enjoy better product quality.
"Our goal is to be a platform with hundreds of millions of consumers, with a quarterly repurchase rate of more than 50% while enabling minute-level data insights." Yang Tao said, "At present, the number of our consumers is about tens of millions, and the quarterly repurchase rate is about 40%, which is still a certain gap with the target." Through our unremitting efforts, we hope to continuously improve revenue, reduce costs, improve user experience, and improve operational efficiency. ”
In order to achieve the above goals, Kilimall urgently needs a capable partner. Under the common goal of "working together to create a better life in China and Africa", Kilimall has carried out comprehensive and in-depth cooperation with Amazon Cloud Technology since 2014.
In Africa, traditional trade pursues "short and fast", and is accustomed to cash procurement, merchants usually dare not easily try to expand long-tail goods, once the purchased goods are not accurate, it is easy to cause inventory risks. Kilimall clearly recognizes that as a Chinese e-commerce company, the long-tail category and long-tail SKUs are its biggest advantages, and the number of SKUs is currently in the millions. This raises the question: how to make a recommendation accurately?
Amazon's Cloud Technology Amazon Personalize service came in handy. By using Amazon Personalize' service, being able to create personalized customer experiences at scale at a faster pace has led to a 15% increase in Kilimall's order conversion rate. Yang Tao said that based on Amazon Cloud Technology's excellent technical architecture, Kilimall's IT unit cost per order has been saved by more than 30%.
At present, Africa is still in the early stage of e-commerce development, and many marketing activities are relatively fresh in the local area. From the perspective of Kilimall's cognition, in Africa to do e-commerce, traffic is not the biggest bottleneck in business growth, how to promote business development at the same time, reduce risks and costs is the key. Amazon Cloud Technologies' Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a highly available, scalable, and secure Kubernetes service, seamlessly matches Killimall's business growth needs, helping Kirimall effectively reduce costs and business risk.
Kilimall is very focused on improving the customer experience for African consumers. With Amazon's cloud technology Amazon Lambda service, images, videos, etc. can be greatly compressed, reducing bandwidth pressure, thereby increasing the consumer's usage time and allowing users to browse without pressure. The construction of modern applications to the extreme, it is necessary to be like Amazon Lambda, in the form of serverless, so that customers only need to pay attention to business code, without managing the underlying operation and maintenance, so as to achieve microservices and modernization of application transformation, improve business agility. Amazon Cloud Technology's high-performance, elastic architecture further improves access speed and automatically expands computing resources as traffic increases, effectively improving customer retention, enabling Kilimall's services to be accessible to thousands of people and further optimize the customer experience.
From the perspective of improving the operational efficiency of the Kilimall e-commerce platform, Amazon Cloud Technology is also indispensable. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object storage service unifies data sources and realizes efficient operational data analysis, so that the resources and funds invested by Killal can play the greatest role, accurate selection of products, and accurate decision-making.
Kilimall is a Localized E-commerce Company in Africa with a Chinese background, and its supply chain is mostly in China, but in order to meet the needs of consumers in different regions, its supply chain must be extended to Dubai, the United Kingdom, Bangladesh and many other countries around the world. As a result, Kilimall needed a global infrastructure and cloud service platform with broad coverage and robustness, as well as leading AI and big data services, as well as timely on-site guidance and service support, so that consumers, suppliers and partners around the world could use its online services.
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A mentor and friend of cross-border e-commerce
For China's cross-border e-commerce, Amazon Cloud Technology can be described as a good mentor and friend, its excellent global cloud infrastructure and rich practical experience in serving e-commerce customers can effectively help China's cross-border e-commerce to achieve global expansion of business and safe and compliant localization operations.
Wang Xiaoye, director of the technical expert team of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China Product Department
Wang Xiaoye, director of the technical expert team of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China Product Department, said that Kilimall's business is globally operated, and the most basic requirement is that cloud vendors must provide infrastructure covering the world. And this is the specialty of Amazon Cloud Technology. Amazon Cloud Technology's business covers 26 regions and 84 availability zones around the world, supporting customers in a variety of forms. In addition, Amazon Cloud Technology also provides low-latency network synchronization by vigorously building its own backbone network.
Kilimall's continual emphasis on continuously improving the customer experience for African consumers is reflected in the requirement for cloud infrastructure to be resilient and able to easily respond to rapid changes in business traffic during big promotions, as well as rapid innovation capabilities, such as the ability to use intelligent services to meet compliance, language translation, localization operations, and personalized recommendations. Through modern application design and cloud-native transformation based on containerization and microservices, Amazon Cloud Technology can provide agile business response support for Kirimall, and realize rapid iteration of functions to meet the needs of rapid innovation of Kirimall's business.
According to Wang Xiaoye, as early as 2002, Amazon put forward the demand for micro-services for the entire e-commerce website, and through the "double pizza team", the entire application was split into small microservices. By 2020, Amazon's e-commerce website will achieve small functions through more than 100,000 microservices, providing flexible and reliable support for the entire e-commerce platform. It is precisely because of such successful microservice transformation experience and accumulation that Amazon Cloud Technology can help e-commerce customers such as Kilimall achieve agile expansion at the microservice level in the face of big promotions and various traffic peaks and troughs. Today, 80% of Kilimall's cloud-hosted containers run on Amazon Cloud Technologies' platform. With built-in seamless, flexible scaling, auto-scaling, and the ability to scale on demand based on the customer's actual load, these services meet Kilimall's changing needs for business traffic.
E-commerce business excellence, it is necessary to carry out refined, in-depth analysis of operational data, which requires cloud vendors to be able to efficiently store and intelligently analyze various resources and massive data, and obtain profound data insights from them to achieve the purpose of cost reduction and efficiency increase.
Amazon Cloud Technology AI services include SaaS-based APIs such as speech semantic vision, chatbots, and word processing, as well as scenario-based SAAS services such as Amazon Monitron's AI-based SaaS service for industrial manufacturing scenarios. Kilimall built a personalized system service using Amazon Personalize. With Amazon Personalize, Kilimall does not need to have machine learning expertise in advance, just provide user events, interaction information, item information, and user information to Amazon Personalize as raw materials, and Amazon Personalize will train models based on actual customer data and make corresponding recommendations. This is crucial for businesses that don't know much about African culture, but want to operate locally in Africa.
"Based on the practices of a large number of customers, we have concluded that the data strategy of enterprise modernization should be divided into 'three steps' to modernize the data infrastructure; break down data silos to achieve unified analysis; and innovate with machine learning." For example, Wang Xiaoye said that Amazon Cloud Technology provides global database capabilities in different database products, including the relational database Amazon Aurora, the key-value database Amazon DynamoDB, the in-memory cache service Amazon ElastiCache, and the scalable, high-durability and fully managed database service Amazon DocumentDB. Kilimall applies the Amazon Cloud Technology Global Database, when a Chinese supplier updates a record in the database, the cross-region replication delay is usually not more than 1 second, and when users in the African region read and use this record, the information on both sides of the Central African side is synchronized with a very low latency. In addition, with the help of Amazon Cloud Technology's global database, users can deploy data disaster recovery capabilities in different regions around the world, and when they encounter force majeure that causes the entire database in one region to completely fail, they can achieve real data recovery in another region within one minute.
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Stand on the shoulders of giants and walk steadily
One of the biggest challenges Facing Kilimall's operations in Africa is the problem of inventory outages, because there is no local production, goods are completely imported from China, and the sea freight cycle alone is more than two months, which puts forward strict requirements for Kilimall's planning capabilities, replenishment plans, etc. To this end, Kilimall plans to adopt Amazon Forecast, a time series forecasting service based on machine learning, to achieve an efficient warehouse replenishment plan; At the same time, it will increase investment in the field of big data, and plans to use Amazon EMR (Big Data Platform in the Cloud) to deepen data analysis. Amazon Cloud Technology's powerful storage capabilities, as well as data lake warehouses, will provide the most basic protection.
"We are at our best since we started. We hope to make greater contributions to the development of digital business in Africa, not only to help Kenya a country to achieve the internal circulation of the digital economy, to promote Kenya's own consumption, but also to integrate into the economic development of more countries in Africa, to promote the economic cycle of the African continent and other continents, and to create more income for the African people. "At the same time, we are committed to driving Chinese goods to the sea and the Localization of China's supply chain in Africa, and hope that in the next three or five years, Kilimall couriers can appear in the streets and alleys of Africa." ”
Kilimall has an ambitious plan to open Fulfilled by Kilimall (FBK service) next year, which is still a scarce service in Africa. "We want to stand on the shoulders of the giant amazon cloud technology and go farther and farther." Yang Tao said.
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