The inaugural eCommerce Africa conference in February in Cape Town was a sold out event with attendees and presenters from the best ecommerce brands and experts in the country.
The attendees walked away with insights from acquisition and conversion strategies, through to payment processes and warehousing fulfillment solutions.
However, there is one major message coming out of the conference; one major message which cannot be ignored. This is the era of mobile commerce. Dougie Hendersen, from Visa, stated that mobile commerce in the USA is growing at 23%, ecommerce at 12% and traditional retail at a mere 1%.
Even google trend stats are showing the immense growth in mobile. Luke Mckend, from google SA, states that there’s more than 50% growth in google search traffic in South Africa on mobile phones since March 2014. This growth isn’t restricted to SA: 84% of ecommerce traffic in Nigeria comes from mobile, compared to 55% in South Africa.
An Emerce Commerce (@emercecommerce) tweet caused a bit of a stir with “shopping isn’t somewhere you go; it’s something you do! #ecomconfex #ecommerce”. Is this statement correct across all LSM’s in SA? One could argue that different customer groups or simply even genders in South Africa (and not necessarily limited to South Africa) would regard shopping as a hobby, past time and necessary week-end social event. That would define it as somewhere you go rather!
Luke Mckend from google SA also raised the enormity of the current challenge of omni-channel retailing. Very few really understand what omni-channel even means. In most definitions, omni-channel refers to your customers being able to receive the same experience from your brand (whether purchasing or receiving customer service) regardless of which channel they are interacting with. Customers are always ‘on’. There is 100% uptime. Because electronic and mobile channels are available 24/7, customers demand immediate responses, but are brands’ service teams able to respond timeously? Is your brand always on across all channels? Is it possible to get real time responsiveness from all channels? Typically, brands need to respond to this complexity from a single view of customer. CRM and customer data are mission critical in the omni-channel challenge. Real customer insight across all channels enables servicing staff to assist with orders and queries regardless of how they interacted with the brand at any time during the omni-channel process.
So do we agree that shopping is something we do, rather than somewhere we go? Will mobile commerce overtake the Saturday stroll to the nearest mall? Maybe not yet, but mobile commerce and mobile search growth rates are something for us to take note of and build strategies towards.
