Review of the Top 3 Online Marketplaces in Ethiopia: Engocha 

By Dagmawi Demeke

Welcome to the second part of the three-part series of our review of the top three web-based online marketplaces in Ethiopia

In this series, Dagmawi Demeke, a digital marketing specialist and SEO strategist at Xenon Digital, takes a deep look into the performance and structures of Qefira, Engocha and Jiji, the top three web-based online marketplace providers in Ethiopia right now.

Part one of the series looked at Qefira, in which Dagmawi reviewed Qefira’s traffic volume, categories, monetization strategy, and user experience.

In this second piece, Dagmawi dwells on Engocha, the country’s second-biggest web-based online market with a wide range of categories. The review uses platforms like SEMRUSH, which are publicly available tools to track and analyze website traffic.

Engocha.com provides a platform for sellers to advertise their products for sale or rent online. Engocha tries to appeal to a wide audience with a news section, a job vacancy board, and by offering uncommon classifieds categories such as “software,” where software companies can put up enterprise software for sale on the ecommerce platform.

Traffic Overview 

Engocha attracts anywhere between 58,000 and 139,000 visits per month. The data varies greatly across traffic analytic tools, but the most reliable tool puts the monthly traffic well above 100,000 visits.

Engocha received about 71,000 unique visitors in June 2022 alone. Although Engocha is the second most popular online web-based marketplace in terms of monthly visits, it has nowhere near the number of listings Qefira has.

The majority of its traffic comes from within the country. Ethiopia accounts for 75.71% of traffic, with the United States accounting for 8.85%, the Netherlands accounting for 8.48%, the United Kingdom accounting for 3.67%, and Cote d’Ivoire accounting for 1.90%.

Engocha has a quality assurance team that reviews listings before they are published, which is one of the reasons Engocha has fewer overall listings compared to Qefira.

Related- Review of the Top 3 Online Marketplaces in Ethiopia: Qefira

Cell phones, laptops, and other electronic items are the main listings attracting traffic to the site, and the electronics category drives the vast bulk of the organic traffic.

Engoch tries to do too much, and its categories are all over the place, even for a general marketplace. The website offers job listings and “latest” news updates, even though the most recent news update was a post made in January.

User Experience

Engocha has the least visually appealing UI/UX design out of the three top online marketplaces. This is evident when we look at the average visit duration, which is 2:21 minutes long, and the bounce rate, which is around 49.37%.

The site is overrun with Google display advertisements to the point where it dramatically affects the user experience.

Engocha’s entire web design is visually unappealing, especially when you try to navigate towards listing an item for sale.

Monetization

Engocha does not have any native advertisements. Google Ads are the primary method of monetization for the e-business platform.

Although Engocha is currently the second most popular e-commerce website in the country, with its unappealing UI and overflow of Google ads, it’s bound to be overtaken by Jiji, the third most popular online marketplace web-based platform.

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Dagmawi Demeke is a digital marketing specialist, SEO strategist, and freelance writer serving both local and international businesses in various sectors. Dagmawi can be reached at [email protected].