#DEMOAfricaTop30 — CarPartsNigeria Is An Online Shopping Plaza For All Things Auto

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gharage

5 min readAug 25, 2015

As part of the on-going DEMO Africa Top 30 Series, we bring you a transcript of our interaction with CarPartsNigeria, a search engine for everything auto in Nigeria. Enjoy the conversation.

What Does CarPartsNigeria Do

CarPartsNigeria (CPN)’s approach to the auto sector of the Nigerian economy was built out of necessity to correct the challenges of shopping for auto-parts in Nigeria. Also, out of the need to centralize parts inventory across the nation, a place to find difficult parts, reduce high prices and ensure trustworthy vendors can compete, while satisfied buyers can appreciate great business.

Therefore, CarPartsNigeria.com is a one-stop search engine for all auto spare parts, cars (new/used) and service vendors in Nigeria. It is an online shopping plaza, an e-market for today’s auto business. It is a market where millions of buyers meet sellers regardless of location. Also, it is a portal that links service vendors i.e. artisans like auto mechanics, rewires, panel beaters, etc. to prospective clients for their auto solutions. Summarily, CarPartsNigeria Automobile Limited is a business aggregator for auto industry in Nigeria.

What makes you different from the competition?

CarPartsNigeria.com provides automobile owners with a unique auto-parts and car buying experience in Nigeria. We bring the best quality products to the consumer at their overall best affordable prices. We intend to fill the vacuum in the automobile industry in Africa by creating the portal that makes auto parts shopping fair and easy for consumers. At the same time, our purpose remains, to add value to our vendors by bringing their products closer and faster to their customers, while giving consumers access to markets that were not originally available to them.

What we hope to achieve is two-fold:

To the customers, we believe we have created an environment that allows them to save time and save money by using our CPN engine aggregator to search multiple vendors inventory for parts. They can compare prices and save a lot of travel time moving from shop to shop across their states. Now you can find your needed auto spare parts across from the convenience of your home and phones. The platform also includes the registrations of all different auto service vendors (Mechanics, Panel Beater, Auto Electricians, Tow Trucks, etc). This brings the convenience of finding the best service artisan(s) in proximity to your location. We are empowering the consumers to vet, rate and review their vendors. Simultaneously we are creating an enabling environment for the sector to bring up the best and the brightest merchants to the consumers.
And for the vendors, we are making them highly visible online, opening up markets that they hitherto would normally not have access. We are promoting their businesses through SEO, social media platforms, etc. We are also giving them access to sell their products online on our E-market platform. Likewise, we are creating an environment that allows for better customer service to the client, which in returns should lead to a more profitable business. We are educating the not-so-computer-savvy vendors by registering an email for them and showing them the basic usage of the internet. Our goal is to revolutionarize the industry and bring it to forefront of the digital age. Moreover, we are creating an E-procurement section for our vendors to leverage the economies of scale to buy directly from manufacturers, thus giving them an advantage over their competitors.

We have also included within the platform, a car-listing offering that most of our competitors have. However, we have gone one step further by introducing a local real-time auction service offering. This is the first in Africa that allows dealers and individual sellers to place their vehicle on the platform through their portals within minutes. These enable consumers to start bidding real-time with the hope of finding the best bargain possible. We have created a channel or avenue for sellers to outsource their products, which allow consumers to have choices like they have never had before.

We use this platform to launch advertising campaigns on behalf of clients and advertisers. CPN leverages the ability to promote and advertise businesses on its platform. We can launch advertising and email campaign for any business on the platform through our banners, emails and social media platforms which can also be directed towards our registered buyers.

[Tweet “”Our measure of success is not a product but customer satisfaction.” — @NGCarParts”]

Any bragging rights or achievements so far?

The immediate bragging rights are time and cost savings i.e. Time savings of going from one Auto store to the other. CPN estimates that shopping on CarPartsNigeria should save an average of 4 hours a day of parts search per every individual looking for parts. This is an incredible amount of time saving that can make everyone more productive. Also, cost saving becomes possible because of the ability to compare prices.

We have created an environment that is changing the customer buying experience especially by providing access to original spare parts and a way to eliminate fake products, save time and save money. Customers can now review and rate their vendors like never before.

We have developed the first Auto Auction site in Africa with a real-time bidding process.

In the last 9 months, we have been able to register over 300 vendors, with over a 1200 registered buyers on the platform. We have a very interactive Facebook page with over 100,000 hits monthly. We’ve had 11,000 fans within this period. Apart from searches that find the products the customer was looking for, we have received over 800+ direct part requests that we have turned over to our vendors as leads.

We have some of the major auto dealers in Nigeria already on our platform as strategic partners (Such includes Globe Motor, CIG Motors, Cocharis) while some are in the process of been on boarded. Such include ELizade Motors, Metropolitan Motors, RT Brisco, Stallion, etc. We are closing on a partnership with one of the largest auto parts manufacturer in Europe, as an exclusive distributor to retailers in Nigeria. In addition, we have also been chosen amongst the 30 best startups in Africa for 2015 by DEMO Africa.

Why did you apply to DEMO?

We believe that DEMO Africa has the best concept for profiling startups in Africa. Their platform provides high visibility and a great advantage to any startup that is looking for mentorship, access to funding from potential investor, exposure and path to the next stage for growth and development.

Who’s on your team?

Founders:

Jide Shobande CF0 — Accounting 25yrs (BS, MBA) jide@carpartsnigeria.com
Bayo Balogun CEO — IT Security 24 yrs (B.A, MCSE, CCNP, RACF, CISSP, CRISC) bayo@carpartsnigeria.com