Is e-commerce alive in South Africa?
by Andrew Smith on 12/12/06 at 12:11 pm
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Biz-Community has published a summary of the Symantec Online Shopping Trends Survey, which questioned 200 people in shopping centres around the country. I was a bit confused with the tone, which seemed to suggest that the following statistic wasn’t impressive:
“of all the respondents, only 50% currently purchase goods over the Internet”
Only 50%? If their findings are accurate (I have my doubts) then that is unbelievable news for South African e-tailers like ourselves. A few million people walk through shopping centres every year, and apparently half of them are happy to buy a Bug Zapper, flag, or cool kitchen tool online from us. If we were to open a flag shop in one of those shopping centres, we would be paying at least R30,000 in rent, plus sales staff, stock purchase, shop fittings, insurance etc, and we would have a total potential market of a few thousand people a month.
Instead, each of our sites costs us a few rand a month to host, we provide support mainly over e-mail in our own time, and all stock sits with the suppliers until we have received payment from the customer. But the really good news is that our potential market is 50% of all the visitors to every shopping centre in South Africa.
I’m about to apply for a subscription to “Executive Yachting” magazine – it seems we’ll have a lot of profit to spend next year.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.
