Online retailers focused on the Africa market are mobilising resources to attract consumer attention over the festive season.

Africa-focused online marketplace Kaymu has launched its Christmas store in key regions throughout the continent including Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

The online shopping network has tailored a festive focused initiative to woo shoppers with substantial discounts and a wide range of available stock.

Part of Kaymu's value proposition is that it serves as an online market for merchants and consumers.

At the same time Jumia is targeting consumers in specific markets including Nigeria and Uganda with the launch of its Christmas shop.

This comes soon after the first Black Friday retail event hosted by the Company's Kenya operation. According to a statement by the Company, the event was a success and resulted in over 50% of visitors accessing the site through a mobile device via Android, Windows or iOS.

East African Business Week in Uganda has quoted Anamaya Bajpai, manager of Jumia Uganda, as confirming that orders placed before midnight on December 18 will be delivered in time for Christmas.

The company opened for business in Uganda in June this year and community manager Eve Wanjiru is also quoted by the publication as saying the industry, whilst young, is growing at a rapid rate.

However, the festive season is a time when retailers should be prepared and have all their resources in place to handle the demand says Brent Lees, senior product marketing manager for EMEA at Riverbed Technology.

"It may be too late to implement new virtualisation and delivery technology to ensure the perfect online shopping experience in 2014. However, the current holiday season shopping boom is an ideal time to use visibility tools to assess website performance and traffic to determine where shoppers are, how they navigate the site and what their user experience is like," says Lees.

"Based on their findings, online retailers are then well placed to put a strategy in place to optimize end-user experience and ensure scalability to deal with peaks and troughs in online traffic in the future," he continues.

In South Africa, where studies indicate that online shopping revenue is growing well, this growth is not due to an increase in the number of shoppers, but rather thanks to a pool of highly active internet users stepping up their spend across ever-growing product categories.

Research and analysis firm World Wide Worx said recently in presenting the MasterCard Online Shopping Behaviour Study 2014 that by the end of last year, only 51.6% of South Africa's 4.6 million internet users were actually shopping online, which leaves room for significant growth.