Online
opportunities
for SMEs
W
hile fewer than
1% of total retail
purchases in
South Africa
take place online,
retail behemoth
Takealot’s CEO Kim Reid said earlier in 2014
that he saw it as a potential R550-billion
industry in the country.
That was on the back of a R1-billion
international fundraising effort, and before
the merger with Kalahari was announced.
The potential for growth is obviously there
– so why have so few local online retailers
claimed a piece of the pie?
Technology company uAfrica.com has
helped over 1 000 South African businesses
get online in the last two years, and the
numbers are only increasing. Managing
Director Andy Higgins, who was part of the
team that founded bidorbuy.co.za in 1999,
says while there’s plenty of opportunity and
growth in the eCommerce space, unrealistic
expectations and poor planning have
scuppered many online ventures.
“People set up an eCommerce solution,
go online and find that their sales don’t meet
what turns out to be a fairly unrealistic set of
expectations,” explains Higgins.
“The assumption seems to be that they’ll
build a store and people will come. There are
a lot of great tools out there that help people
30
SME's.indd 30
eCommerce is no longer the wave of the future –
it’s here and it’s big business. By Trevor Crighton
set up eCommerce stores, but the challenge
for them is to get traffic to those stores to
actually make sales.”
Fortunately, just about every other step
in the chain is being made simpler by
technology. “People build great, functional
sites, but need to overcome problems with
payments, and logistical and warehousing
issues,” says Higgins. There are a lot of new
business models being developed around
solving the nuts and bolts issues. Higgins cites
ParcelNinja as a great example – a shared
warehouse concept which allows for multiple
tenants so small operators can get their stock
into a warehouse and have it delivered from
a central point. Cape Town-based Wumdrop
has been described as “uber for deliveries”,
giving retailers the chance to summon a
courier at the touch of a button, and pay a
per-kilometre rate for deliveries.
The eComm