By Cheryl Ingram
Online shopping in South Africa is on a steep upward trajectory. Data released by World Wide Worx and Mastercard indicated that the South African market reached R55-billion in 2022, a 35% year-on-year increase. And predictions suggest that online retail will continue to grow by 25% in 2023 which could see it exceed 5% of total retail in South Africa for the first time.
E-commerce in South Africa has come a long way in just ten years. Back in 2013 e-commerce was relatively uncharted territory, with MRP leading the field in terms of traditional brick and mortar retailers entering the online shopping space, alongside online only retailers like Spree, Zando, Kalahari, Groupon, OLX, Takealot and Bid or Buy. The online grocery space was non-existent and most of the top 100 retailers were still grappling with the idea that South African consumers would one day actively choose to shop online versus in-store.
Fast forward a decade, and it is a vastly different picture. Online shopping is here – and it is here to stay. Brandmapp’s latest data shows that over 65% of the 33 000 respondents had shopped from one of SA’s largest online retailers in the last year – a 25% jump from just two years ago. For TDMC our advantage is that we made the decision early on to focus our energy on e-commerce. This served us well during the pandemic when e-commerce really exploded – we were already an accredited expert partner of Shopify with 80+ builds to our name leading up to 2020.