The daunting hurdles of construction.

Getting ready to build? You need wood? Get it from Kikomba, Tiles? From Industrial area. Furniture? Mombasa road. Steel & Cement? Athi River or any hardware store. Sand? Athi River, Mai Mahiu. Stone-Ndarugo? Thika, Mai Mahiu…and the list of items and their logistical locations only gets better. (pun intended)

This would make for a great road trip, but, it’s a time consuming, tiresome and expensive chore. It could get even more expensive if you delegate this task to a broker.

Issues of quality will be tabled, quantities, transport costs et al will be discussion points at some point in time during the purchases of these items. It takes a little getting used to and hence why many people prefer to outsource this task to contractors and brokers.

However, all this is now quite easily done. No brokers, no contractors needed. All you need is perhaps a Bill of Quantities from the contractor or Quantity Surveyor, your computer and steady internet connectivity and “voila” get all your products in less than an hour. It would also help to know where to look otherwise you will be inundated with thousands of suppliers.

M-jenzi.com hosts all construction materials and home improvement products and services suppliers. M-jenzi.com vet to verify that users get the best suppliers of construction and home improvement products and services to make shopping on M-jenzi.com a wonderful, time worthy and value for money experience.

Visit www.m-jenzi.com and tell us which products and vendors you would like to see on the platform.

Happy shopping!

Construction Made Easy

The mere thought of sourcing for construction materials, house furniture, fittings etc.. Is quite a daunting task. Going from place to place, browsing for quality, comparing prices, negotiating and finally getting to purchase what you want can take roughly a month or more assuming that you get the items and the quality you need in the financial budget you have.

Other than being a painstakingly laborious task, the next noteworthy issue is safety of your purchases in transit and in storage. For consumable and sensitive items such as cement and sand, great care needs to be taken so that your cement does not get into contact with water as it will ultimately harden and thus destroy your cement, while wet sand will create the impression that you have the right weight quantities.

Storage of cement is equally important for the same water hazard threat. Ensure that your cement is stored above the floor, either on wooden pallets or crates but not on the bare floor. This will ensure that your precious cement does not turn to stone overnight.

Engaging certified transporters for your materials and furniture is important too. This ensures that your products are transported with maximum care, in a timely fashion with guarantees to receive your products and warranties for compensation should the need arise.

Whenever you go out to procure building materials or furniture, enquire from the supplier about their transport policy/s to establish how secure your purchases will be when you get them.

Send us your experience in shopping for building materials and how long it took you to complete purchases and receive them?

Websites are the NEW BUSINESS.

If you are in business today and don’t have a website presence, chances are that you are missing out on some very potential but unseen customer prospects.

The average cost of a simple yet effective website ranges between Kes. 15,000/- to 20,000/- depending on what features you want. The rewards however far outweigh the costs assuming that your web presence does well in the market. Other than website development costs, there are other factors to consider to ensure that your website gains visibility and generates the leads that will engage your visitors to purchase your products or services. This is where it gets tricky. Providing content, channeling this content to a targeted audience, following up and engaging leads can be quite a daunting task. Not to mention that it needs to be done frequently which most often than not warrants one to engage a social media / email marketing service provider/s.

This stage however, can be bypassed. Website development, branding, content creation, client targeting, social media and email marketing, etc. can all be undertaken by a multi-vendor (Marketplace) platform. These type of websites host and market a huge number of vendors or merchants on their website. This allows the vendors presence to be visible to the multitude of visitors and also to focus more on their products and services and not the hands-on online marketing. It is also cheaper and more efficient to maintain and provides a higher potential ROI. A few examples of Multi-Vendor websites are Amazon.com, E-bay, Alibaba.com and more closer to home, M-jenzi.com