Zimbuyer.com- What’s missing in the Caribbean

December 19, 2007

by Ingrid Riley
Zimbuyer.Com is a new one stop online shopping facility for Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, offering easy access to purchase groceries and other services for their loved ones back home. The site is attractive, easy to use and allows Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora a single source in which to buy everything from groceries, fresh meat, back to school supplies, construction material, satellite TV to generators and lighting.

The Caribbean Opportunity
We love this concept for Jamaica, which has annual remittances exceeding US$1billion and is part of the report that revealed that 70% of the Caribbean Diaspora living in the US is online. In Jamaica and in the Caribbean we are yet to capture the Diaspora’s imagination and facilitate their online spending ( The American based Jamaican Diaspora are reported to have an annual disposable spending of over US$50billion) in a big way like zimbuyer.com has. So far only two major companies-Super Plus Food Stores, Jamaica’s largest supermarket chain and Courts, the large furniture and hirepurchase retailer, are offering that facilityonline.

So what are we waiting for? As is typical with some Jamaican companies, they tend to be more reactive than proactive, they wait until a competitor comes in and provides a threat to their comfort zone and then and only then do they move. Hey maybe we call call on some Trinidadians to start this ecommerce fire.

Related story- Got Diaspora management?