Conrad Mwanawashe Business Reporter
LEADING global brands and local manufacturers have signed up to one of Zimbabwe’s largest auctioneers, Hammer and Tongues online shopping platform following the growth of the product by about 300 percent since its launch in July.

The online platform has attracted the LG brand, Food Lovers Market Fruit and Veg Greendale, pork products company Colcom and Zimbabwe’s largest seed producer Seed Co. All the new companies are expected to be integrated in the next seven days. The new brands join other leading brands such as cement maker, Lafarge, Hastt Zimbabwe, Africa Lotto, KIA Motors and OKMart who are already signed up.

Hammer and Tongues Africa Holdings chief executive officer Mr Brian Makwabarara said in an interview that a lot of big brand names are keen to sign up to the online platform.

“We have launched Food Lovers Market Fruit and Vegetables Greendale on the platform. For the first time we are going to start distributing fresh produce. People will be able to buy a full pack of groceries apart from just dry groceries,” said Mr Makwabarara.

“Agricultural inputs and implements dealer, Farm Shop are also coming on board. Since the launch we have had other stores come on such as Lifestyle, One Stop Power Shop have all signed up. Chinese owned Ivato Horizon Supermarket has also come on the platform. Stationary supplier Rank Wholesalers are on and the LG brand is already signed up while other big supermarkets are expected to integrate in the first quarter of next year,”

Registered buyers have reached 10 000 since launch in July. By the end of this week, 35 leading chains would be online from 12 stores at launch.

“I’m sure that by the end of the year we would have grown phenomenally and we hope for real growth in 2016.

Hammer and Tongues has so far conducted online live cattle auctions which have been successful.

Mr Makwabarara said the live cattle auctions have become popular with sellers who sell their cattle from their locations as opposed to the old system where the farmer had to physically move cattle to auction centres.

“The beauty about the live cattle auctions is that the cattle farmer does not have to move their cattle. We go to the cattle farmer’s location take photographs of the cattle and weigh before conducting a sell,” said Mr Makwabarara.

Apart from adding merchants, Hammer and Tongues has integrated onto the PayNow payment platform, to add to EcoCash, Telecash, Visa, MasterCard.

“PayNow is a payment gateway and we are putting them on the platform. This means that people are able to use the PayNow system to make their payments via Visa, MasterCard, EcoCash and Telecash. We are hoping that this system will help us cater for the diaspora market. They have a very good system and we should see a huge improvement in terms of the payment gateway. The payment system is the biggest challenge that we have encountered,” said Mr Makwabarara.

“In terms of turnover, since we launched we have turned over a couple of hundreds of thousands of dollars since we launched the platform in July. If we were to compare the first month, July that is, and November our turnover would have grown by more than 300 percent,” said Mr Makwabarara.

Trends show that Zimbabweans are up to speed with the online shopping technology.

“What we have found out is that contrary to what people believe, Zimbabweans are up to speed with this kind of technology already. It’s just the question of making them aware, making sure that our payment gateways work all the time, so we work with our service providers to ensure that they have uptime. We must also make sure that we have as much diverse goods as possible. So as we upload more products we are going to see more activity,” said Mr Makwabarara.

Another aspect that Hammer and Tongues has concluded is an agreement with a financial institution to finance people who want to buy property through the online platform. Mr Makwabarara said the financial institution will be offering “very good interest rates”.

The Hammer and Tongues chief said the financial institution will also provide asset finance, particularly on new vehicles.

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