Ghanaians help fuel sales on Africa’s social marketplace

MoboFree.com, the leading African social marketplace, has said that the total volume of items currently for sale in its marketplace is worth $526 million and is expected to reach $1.5 billion by 2015.

Presently, it has 3.3 million registered users, including two million in Nigeria and a strong footprint in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Ghana.

MoboFree, among the largest and most successful mobile social and trusted classifieds platforms in Africa, uploads thousands of new classified advertisements from members every day, generating an average of 60 million page impressions monthly.

The best-selling items are phones, tablets and mobile devices, followed by clothes, fashion and beauty and electronic devices, according to MoboFree.

Its technological platform makes buying and selling online easy for any African user with any device, not only for PCs and smartphones but also for old phones with small screens.

"Africa is home to six of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world. Our strong performance once again confirms the success of our model and is indicative of the high level of activity in all markets in which we operate,” said MoboFree CEO and co-founder Neringa Kudarauskiene, who is from Lithuania.

“We are now looking for new partners with which to share our exciting expansion plans as we see enormous opportunities arising in Africa."

MoboFree is a social marketplace with a unique user-centric approach rather than the traditional item-centric approach.

It allows its buyers and sellers to obtain a large amount of personal information about one other – ranging from photos and mutual friends to ratings or other data that enables identification of whether or not a person is trustworthy.

Following in the African tradition of haggling, MoboFree allows its members to communicate and negotiate conveniently without leaving the platform.

They can do this through private messages or through chat. MoboFree members send over eight million private messages a month.