As one of South Africa’s longest standing and most well-known e-commerce platforms, Bidorbuy provides its customers with access to an online marketplace populated with a huge variety of products and services.

As part of the company’s future-forward strategy and goal of reducing the barrier to entry for all its customers, it has partnered with Huawei to migrate the Bidorbuy app to the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) platform. With this move, Bidorbuy now has its app in Huawei’s official app store, AppGallery, and on Huawei Mobile Services, which ensures that users across multiple mobile platforms and devices can now use the app from anywhere in the country.

Bidorbuy partnered with Huawei to make its app accessible to Huawei mobile device users
Feature-rich and easy to use, the app allows for sellers to reach millions of potential customers on the move
The app’s arrival on the HMS platform was launched with a R5 000 competition with Bidorbuy

“If you don’t have an app on the HMS store, AppGallery, then you’re cutting out a huge segment of the market,” says Craig Lubbe, CEO of Bidorbuy. “Huawei devices are affordable and competitive and are used by a significant percentage of the South African population. We realised early on that having an app in their store provided an excellent opportunity for us to connect with our users, and to ensure that we build our visibility in the market.”

The Bidorbuy app offers consumers a quick and easy way of doing their online shopping, and it affords entrepreneurs an opportunity to further refine their offerings and attract new customers. As a key differentiator in a competitive market it made sense to partner with Huawei to put the app into a new space that attracted more users and opened up more opportunities.

“Our strategy is to ensure that our services are well positioned on major channels so they are accessible to our community,” adds Lubbe. “Our users consist of both buyers and sellers and this means we are always looking at new ways of lowering the barrier to entry so they can connect with one another on our vibrant platform. This is particularly relevant right now, when we know that our retail customers are facing a complex economic future and need spaces where they can potentially grow their businesses.”

For Bidorbuy, the migration of the app to HMS was a seamless process that took less than a week to complete. With support from the Huawei team, making sure that the requirements and restrictions were met throughout, it was straightforward, and the app is already available for customers to use. The numerous feature-sets available through HMS are not yet being used by Bidorbuy, but the company is continually enhancing the app and its capabilities.

Well received

“To celebrate the successful arrival of the app on the HMS platform, we ran a download and spend promotion,” concludes Anne-Marie Green, marketing manager at Bidorbuy. “Users that downloaded the app from HMS and purchased an item using the platform before 30 April 2020 were immediately entered into a draw to win a R5 000 Bidorbuy voucher. It was an exciting way for us to get people to try out the app and enjoy the experience we’ve created for them online. We’ll also be running future promotions on the HMS store going forward.”

Huawei adds that the Bidorbuy campaign was well received by Huawei users, who were keen to try out the latest top app which has become available on the Huawei Mobile Services platform and in Huawei’s official app store, AppGallery, which boasts a plethora of the most well-loved apps.