What Kenyan buyers ask before they buy

We read 554 comments on 10 Kenyan vendor videos on TikTok. 21% asked the price. The five buying themes together covered 36%. Those are price, location, whether it is available, the size, and delivery.

The lines repeat. One buyer asked "how much and where is the location". Another asked "payment on delivery?" A third asked "Is the 3rd red one available???" A fourth wrote "kasarani unaeza deliver", which asks if you deliver to Kasarani.

Big sellers see the same thing. On the last 5 posts of 15 big Kenyan Instagram sellers, 21% of 110 comments were buying questions. One gift seller alone had eight versions of "Is this available? Price pls".

Across all 1,373 TikTok comments we read, price was 12.3% and delivery was 9.9%. Before anything else, the buyer wants a number. The second question follows.

On the vendor videos, "where is the location" was the second most common question after the price. We first read it as buyers checking whether a seller is real. The review showed we had over-read it.

64 comments asked about location. Only 2 of them mentioned trust. Most of the rest were pickup and delivery questions. "uko wapi" means where are you. "location ngong town" names a place for pickup or delivery.

Outside Nairobi the question gets sharper. Under one video, a buyer asked how you can order from Nairobi and expect to pay on delivery. 61 people liked it. Another asked why Juja was not pay after delivery.

So the second question is also about the order. The buyer wants to know if you deliver, where, and for how much. The next finding is how buyers want to pay.

Almost every vendor post in our X sample led with "Pay on delivery within Nairobi". It works as a promise to win the sale, not as a feature. Under a furniture video, one buyer put the rule plainly. "Kama si payment on delivery, unaoshwa customer, usikubali". If it is not pay on delivery you are being conned, so do not agree.

Then the fraud moves inside pay on delivery. Under one video about a pay on delivery scam, played 82k times, "I only trust jumia" got 237 likes. Others said to ask the boda rider how to pay. One seller wrote "have the seller give the rider an invoice and pay after getting the invoice, easy".

Sellers tell the other side. Under a video titled "Pay on Delivery will humble you", one wrote "Rider fee paid BEFORE dispatch". Another said to "incorporate delivery fees on your prices". Elsewhere they talk about fake orders and buyers who refuse at the door. They talk about a rider paid for a trip that went nowhere.

Here is the catch. Buyers name "send the delivery fee first" as a scam. On r/Kenya, one wrote that they "just block you after sending the 600". Sellers want the fee up front. Buyers fear paying it. The next finding is about the price nobody will say.

One Facebook post asked "Easiest way to lose a customer’s trust in 30 seconds?" The answer was "DM for price". It got 957 reactions. On Instagram, a buyer wrote under a coaching reel. "As a customer, I immediately look for other suppliers every time I get that ‘DM for price’ text."

A hidden price reads as an unfair price. One rant on DM pricing was played 553k times. Under it, "I just know they’re giving different prices to everyone" got 57,825 likes. That video is probably not Kenyan. The Kenyan version came under a big seller’s video. The problem, one buyer wrote, is sellers who are coy about the price. 314 people liked it.

Delivery fees are part of the price buyers compare. One X post set a 340 bob courier fee to Eldoret against 500 bob asked across Nairobi.

But many buyers like the chat itself. On r/nairobi, one asked why so many Kenyan online businesses prefer DMs over websites. The replies favoured the chat. "As a buyer I prefer DMs. Easy to negotiate." "Having a website proves that you are legit but I’ll always prefer a call or DM." "DM is always instant, but a website offers credibility."

What buyers dislike is a hidden price and a slow reply. One complained that answering takes 48 hours. The complaint was not about talking to the seller. Trust is the next theme, and the one we got wrong at first.

The biggest post in our X sample told Nairobi buyers to make pay on delivery a personal rule. It had 3,851 likes in January 2026. On r/nairobi, one wrote "Online business will never thrive in Kenya because of lack of trustworthiness." The reply began "I would never buy from random sellers on Instagram".

Nation put it in three lines. "Sellers fear fake orders. Buyers fear paying before seeing. Both sides don’t trust each other." Under an iPhone scam video played 136k times, one buyer wrote "Kitu ikipita 10k sinunui online". If it is over 10k, I do not buy it online. 653 people liked that.

Buyers check for signals a seller cannot fake. On Reddit, the top comment said the first red flag for an Instagram page is a blocked comment section. Others named four pages sending the same photo, comments stuffed with fake praise, and pages that keep changing their names. Big sellers get copied too. One with 342k plays on a video had to tell buyers it was their only business account.

But count by volume and trust is smaller than it sounds. Across all 1,373 TikTok comments, scam or trust was 4.7%. On the vendor videos it was 0.9%. The loud trust lines sat on a few viral posts. Our first write-up called trust the loudest conversation. Four reviewers read the write-up, and we withdrew that. The last finding is about who we did not hear.

Of 147 recent Instagram hashtag posts, 2 had 10 or more comments. Small sellers’ buyers ask in DMs and on WhatsApp. Public scraping cannot see those chats.

Sellers are barely heard in the data at all. About 1.7% of the 1,373 TikTok comments were in a seller’s voice. Their own complaints were practical. They wrote about collecting the delivery fee before dispatch, and about no-shows. They wrote about getting customers and the cost of ads. They wrote about sizing, returns, tracking orders and selling on credit.

The table shows where the voices came from. Most are TikTok comments. About 1.7% are in a seller’s voice. One quick round, five places, and a scraper that reads about 60 comments per video. How we did it, and what the numbers cannot say, follows.

We did one quick round of reading, written up on 20 October 2026. We read public posts and comments only. We did not interview anyone.

On Google, with Kenya results, we ran 42 searches through a search results tool. They found Reddit threads, X posts, Facebook groups, news, blogs and competitor sites. They also found Instagram and TikTok posts by topic.

On X, a scraper pulled 168 tweets from 8 searches. Two of the searches were "pay on delivery" Nairobi and "DM for price" Kenya. Only 27 were opinions. The rest were vendor ads.

On Reddit, a scraper read 10 threads in r/Kenya, r/nairobi and r/nairobitechies, 121 posts and comments in all. A broad search of r/Kenya was mostly off topic.

On TikTok, a scraper found 150 videos from 10 searches. We picked the 29 most relevant Kenyan videos, 10 vendor posts and 19 discussions. A second scraper read 1,373 comments on them, about the top 60 on each video.

On Instagram, scrapers read 151 comments on 9 discussion reels. They read 110 comments on the last 5 posts of 15 big Kenyan sellers. They also pulled 147 recent hashtag posts.

We coded the comments by keyword into themes, in English, Swahili and Sheng. The themes were price, location, availability and size, delivery, pay on delivery, scam and trust, M-Pesa, ghosting and order intent. 30 comments were then checked at random against their tags. The percentages are approximate.

The searches cost nothing on a free plan. The scrapers cost about $3.60 in credit. Four reviewers read the first write-up on the same day. The numbers on this page are the corrected ones.

This was one quick round. Nobody was interviewed.

Our searches were loaded. We could recover 52 of the queries. 26 of them, 50%, held a word such as scam, fake, ghost, fraud or pay on delivery. With "DM for price" added, 31 of 52, 60%, were seeded with a pain we already had in mind. Only 14 of 52, 27%, were neutral. 13 of the 29 TikTok videos came from searches for pay on delivery, vendor scam and fake orders. Those 13 carried 49% of the comments.

We counted by volume, not by likes. The loudest trust lines came from a few viral posts. One tweet, one iPhone scam video, and one rant on DM pricing that is probably not Kenyan.

The coding has errors. 9 of 30 randomly checked comments had a wrong or missing tag. The scam tag mixed fake goods from one crackdown video with payment fraud. Keyword coding gives approximate percentages.

Sellers are barely heard. About 1.7% of TikTok comments were in a seller’s voice. Our themes had no place for getting customers, ad cost, time, stock or price competition. So the data says nothing about those.

Some posts are old or not Kenyan. Several quotes are from 2020 to 2023. Two Nigerian videos were left out of the conclusions. The viral DM pricing rant is read as general buyer feeling, not Kenyan fact.

The sample leans. Google results lean toward SEO pages. On X, only 27 of the 168 tweets were opinions, the rest vendor ads. The TikTok scraper reads about the top 60 comments per video.

Small sellers’ conversations happen in DMs and WhatsApp. Public scraping cannot see them. Interviews would fill that gap.