10ngah brings Cyber Monday to Zim:Its all about $50 smartphones and $70 tablets

For most people who buy tech gadgets from the US the past few days have been the highlight of their calendar. Last week we had Black Friday(Friday after Thanksgiving) which comes with a massive discount on a lot of retail merchandise.

Today is Cyber Monday, where various online retailers offer huge discounts on their inventory, including tech gadgets.

In keeping up with this trend, Zimbabwean online retailer 10ngah.com has started its own Cyber Monday, and has extended it into a Cyber Week promotion.

Effectively 10ngah is offering discounts of between 25 and 50% on normal prices for their inventory  to match what typically happens in other countries and increase sales online.

These discounts have been extended to all products available from 10ngah. For tech gadgets this has lowered prices for tablets that now start at $69.99 and $50 for entry level Android phones. Refurbished laptops are going for $175.

According to the 10ngah team this Zimbabwean Cyber Monday/Cyber Week is meant to encourage consumers to actually shop around for good discounts and also become savvy online shoppers.

No doubt, this is a great initiative, considering how IT gadgets assumed a new 25% duty that was supposedly justified by the high mobile penetration rate.

As much as this was meant to offer the State an opportunity to raise more funds, it will likely make it harder for our smartphone penetration to increase. At 15% it still falls far behind countries like Kenya with a 67% rate.

Maybe we need more Cyber days or weeks not only to encourage online retailing for guys like 10ngah but also to make smartphones and other gadgets more accessible to more Zimbabweans?