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Wasoko is an e-commerce company that sells everyday consumer goods and delivers them to small shops and retailers across Africa.
Wasoko is a company that sells everyday consumer goods to small neighborhood shops, and then delivers them right to the shopkeeper's door. The customer is the duka — the tiny roadside store you find on almost every street in Kenya and across much of Africa, run by an owner who sells soap, cooking oil, rice, phone credit, and toothpaste to the people who live nearby.
The business exists because of a daily slog. A shopkeeper usually has to close up, travel to a crowded wholesale market, negotiate prices, pay cash, arrange transport, and haul everything back — often losing a day's sales in the process. Wasoko turns that into a few taps on a phone. The shopkeeper orders, Wasoko's own warehouses and delivery network buy in bulk and bring the goods to the shop, often the next day. Everything is built around a simple promise: easy ordering, dependable delivery, and prices that make the trip to the market unnecessary. Wasoko makes its money by buying goods cheaply from manufacturers because it orders in large volumes, then selling to shopkeepers at a modest markup. Its own warehouses and vans do the delivering, so the efficiency of that network is the whole game. The company, which started in Tanzania under the name Sokowatch, grew into one of Africa's most talked-about startups, expanding to Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Senegal. A 2024 merger with a rival called MaxAB was billed as a tie-up of two of the continent's biggest B2B e-commerce players, though the two companies later restructured that arrangement.
The appeal for manufacturers is real too: Wasoko gives them a way to reach thousands of tiny shops that a traditional distributor could never reach cheaply, and to see real sales data from them. The risks are equally real. This is a thin-margin, cash-hungry business, and Africa's informal retail market has punished several well-funded startups. Wasoko's bet is that scale, owned logistics, and customer loyalty built through reliable service will eventually turn a low-margin slog into a durable business.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026