Pickup Mtaani has slowly but surely cemented itself as a go to delivery and logistics partner for any merchant small or big who wishes to have a reliable, seamless and affordable experience for their clients who purchase from their online channels; social media, WhatsApp or via a website.

Last year, the company had done more than 1 million successful deliveries for merchants.

More than just being a reliable delivery partner, Pickup Mtaani has also managed to improve the trust levels between merchants and customers who buy products online.

As I learnt from Okiya Ken, one of the Pickup Mtaani Co-founders, e-commerce fraud doesn’t just happen when a merchant cons a customer, it also quite often happens when a customer pretends to buy a product only to refuse to pay when the product finally arrives, or they edit payment confirmation texts to appear as though they paid full price when using the pay on delivery option.

To help improve trust and merchant operations, Pickup Mtaani launched their new app late last year which comes with a myriad of features that are so far helping many merchants sell better online. The app so far has more than 20,000 downloads across both Android and iOS.

 Among these features is “Pochi” a built in payments wallet in the Pickup Mtaani app that merchants can use to collect funds especially from customers who request to pay on delivery.

Pay on delivery is not a new concept as big players such as Jumia also have this feature, but even they have faced the same fraud issues since inception. Pickup Mtaani is in a good position to solve this because they handle the delivery of the product from end to end, merchant to customer. Their certified riders ensure that payment is made by the customer to the Pochi wallet before leaving and is reflected on the merchants’ end. The merchant can then withdraw the money at their own convenience.

More than that, the app also introduced a comprehensive tracking feature so that users can be able to track their packages right from handoff, to sorting, transit, to final delivery. This feature has helped put at ease both merchants and customers. It has also helped improve transparency in terms of delivery times and schedules.

Merchants can now also manage multiple businesses within one account, view in depth sales and revenue analytics and track their customer data on endpoints such as new customers, total served customers to mention a few.

In the near future, Pickup Mtaani aims to take this data analysis feature for merchants even further by enabling them know things such as; where in the city or country do most of their purchases come from, customer return frequency from a particular area among others.

They also aim to improve trust and transparency further in the e-commerce sector by allowing the public to be able to view merchants’ order histories. They already have this data so the idea is to help customers know that if a merchant has delivered X number of orders successfully via their service then they can be ranked at a given trust level.

A PoS system is also on the way for Pickup Mtaani merchants as mentioned by Okiya.

The company also did a service test in Mombasa last year in a bid to expand their operations to the Kenyan Coastal City and finally launched there last week.

Both merchants and customers can now enjoy affordable and reliable delivery services within the city of Mombasa as well as inter-county for instance from Nairobi to Mombasa and vice versa.

“We went into Mombasa first because we wanted to be able to connect the two biggest cities in Kenya as far as hustle free and affordable logistics for e-commerce is concerned, after this the goal is to expand into other counties in Kenya so that we can have a solid foothold in the country before we spread our wings across borders. Our thinking is very Pan-African and this is just the beginning of what we hope to achieve as a company, we want to make e-commerce easy to get into for even the smallest merchant on the African continent, M-pesa is doing it with payments, we’ll do it in logistics for e-commerce.” Says Okiya.

As at last year Pickup Mtaani was serving up of 25,000 merchants selling online and that number keeps growing steadily.