Indigenous Namibian products now available directly to European customers via namshop.de
It is only a month since a dedicated digital e-commerce platform in Germany started listing Namibian goods but already local suppliers are seeing the benefits.
Early in September, local digital enterprise, rainmaker digital, announced it has entered a collaboration agreement with NamShop in Germany to market Namibian products, first to the European market, but later with the intention to spread fully international.
The website www.namshop.de is an inclusive platform to market Namibian products from the youth, women, and small businesses in Namibia online.
Payment and Logistics processes are completely covered from www.namshop.de as well.
The marketing collaborative is supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit, the GIZ. Namshop.de already lists more than 75 unique and well-known Namibian products.
Antje Kesselman, owner of namshop.de in Germany, said “We are thrilled by this collaboration and partnership to grow the number of Namibian products, assist more Namibians to sell their products and to be able to contribute to Namibian businesses and to further optimize our online presence to gain more traffic and revenue for our partners through this partnership.”
All of this is now seamlessly integrated and taken care of with an operation here in Namibia and an operation in Germany”, said Thomas Mueller, founder, and Chief Executive of rainmaker digital.
The GIZ “Promotion of Business Advisory and Economic Transformation” (ProBATS) Project in cooperation with the Ministry of Industrialization, Trade and SME Development supports private businesses in their drive to grow their markets.
The Namibia Employers Federation, supported by ProBATS and rainmaker digital have signed a partnership to support the youth, women, and small Namibian businesses by providing access to an online sales platform to market local artifacts and other relevant products to tourists, customers abroad and Namibians who love genuine Namibian products and would like to support local businesses.
“It has been quite a journey in this design and development process where technology was the easiest part. The most challenging has been to design the perfect business model for our Namibian suppliers, the logistics to ship products to our overseas customers and the system to pay for purchases,” said Mueller.
