Kenyan Startup MarketForce Shuts Down Reja Reja It’s e-Commerce Arm: Here’s Why
Y Combinator-backed Kenyan startup MarketForce has announced the shutdown of its B2B e-commerce platform, RejaReja.
The company’s co-founder, Tesh Mbaabu, shared this development via a blog post stating that Reja Reja was shut down due to the struggle with profitability.
He wrote,
“The B2B distribution business that was RejaReja became unsustainable for a few reasons. Firstly, the retail FMCG market has razor-thin margins, which means that at a unit level, we struggled with profitability. The segment is also highly price elastic, which means the price wars are consistent. That’s always a race to the bottom.
“After immense efforts to make our business model sustainable, including downsizing the business to extend the runway for as long as possible, we have concluded that it is no longer feasible to keep RejaReja operational.”
RejaReja was built to empower one million merchants to harness the power and scale of the technology and realize their maximum potential by 2030. Nine months ago, the e-commerce startup crossed 4 million in transactions processed.
Moving ahead, the company’s co-founder Tesh Mbaabu disclosed that rather than starting from scratch, the company has decided to join forces with founders who had built a business focused on a different kind of merchant, an online merchant selling a lot via social platforms.
The company is pivoting to “Chpter”, a social commerce startup that provides an AI-driven conversational platform tailored for business owners on WhatsApp and Instagram.
Chpter empowers businesses to unlock more revenue through the fastest-growing commerce channel, social media. It provides an AI-powered conversational commerce platform that enables merchants to sell more on social platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram by automating conversations, marketing, and payments all in one place.
Tesh says they are building a product for merchants who want to grow their businesses and make money even while asleep, all of which can be done through the power of automation and artificial intelligence.
Chpter is now live in Kenya and South Africa, powering hundreds of merchants and assisting them in seeing up to 5x revenue growth across their social channels due to the power of conversational commerce.
