Leading Kenyan car sales website www.cheki.co.ke has announced the launch of a Kiswahili version of its East African online car marketplace.
Cheki was launched in Kenya in September 2010 and has rapidly grown to become the favourite car classifieds website in Kenya with over 21,000 cars listed from the majority of Kenyan used cars and Japanese car dealers in all of Kenya’s major cities. The classifieds site has a Nigeria version which ranks in the Top 20 Nigerian content websites.
Cheki Africa Managing Director Carey Eaton said
“Offering East African car buyers an easy way to connect to sellers in our local language is an important step in building towards our goal of making it easier for car buyers and sellers to connect with each other.”
Cheki first released a test version of its Kiswahili mobile and web browser sites in the Tanzanian market where the local language version is now the default language rather than English. Having tested the site in the smaller market in Tanzania, the company updated some of the language and usability features there before rolling the update first to its Kenya mobile website and finally the main website in Kenya.
The expansion of Cheki’s language capability also involved an update to the core architecture of Cheki’s technology platform to enable multiple local language capabilities for other markets including its market-leading operations in Nigeria and potential expansion to Francophone Africa.
Cheki Africa has relied on original content generated from actual dealers instead of scrapping it from competitors. Most classifieds sites are still not doing the actual collection of data but rely on data on other classifieds sites to fill their pages. Driving around Nairobi, you would see Cheki billboards and Cheki branded cars which are a great way of recruiting advertisers.
Cheki is among the Top 10 Kenya-content websites in late 2011 and has won the confidence of the majority of the Kenyan car dealers and private seller markets. Cheki hopes to be the among the most popular Swahili websites with the release of the Swahili classified website version.
Cheki has also released and integrated Swahili versions of its Android and Nokia Ovi mobile applications as part of the update.
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