Stay away from Kilimall Online Shopping

If you’re part of the Reddit r/Kenya community, you’ve seen the trending post on Kilimall running a scam. This isn’t the first of such complaints by affected users. Over the past years, there have been discussions by Kenyans on their experiences with the online shopping platform.

Back in 2017, I wrote an article questioning Kilimall’s reviews. To date, there hasn’t been a public official response by the company. They saw it and ignored it. And from the many responses from that article, you can see there’s a good number of customers who have been affected in one way or another from shopping from the platform.

While there are many other problems customers complain about, the major issue that’s open to everyone who visits the site remains to be ‘reviews’. Everyone wants to know what they’re buying is legit, and that’s why they check out reviews before buying something. Kilimall – I must say, knowingly – makes the reviews appear legit and highly rated to lie to customers. That was the basis of my article in 2017, and from the Reddit post linked above, there’s a similar issue in 2021.

As you can see above, those are five-star reviews for the Infinix NOTE 4 PRO which had just launched. I remember questioning myself wondering how a device that had just launched already had customers reviewing it. How had they purchased the devices, received them on the same day and decided to go online and leave reviews?

Not only is such an action unfair to the customers being tricked, it is also unfair to the brands whose devices have been listed on the site. For example in the case above, it makes it seem like Infinix which at the time was selling the device exclusively on Kilimall, was taking part in the fake reviews.

The good thing is that in 2021, there are very many options to choose from when buying stuff online. Very many companies have invested in, and are trying to make online shopping streamlined. So just steer clear of companies like Kilimall. And if they’re the only one listing a product you want, then try your luck.