Johannesburg, 23 Jun 2014
Esquire Technologies, an international award-winning company and one of the leading distributors in southern Africa of IT, mobility, digital and consumer lifestyle products from international vendors, has announced it has reached a milestone of 30 000 online orders placed on its Web site to date.
This was confirmed by Mahomed Cassim, CEO of Esquire Technologies, who said the company commenced online sales four years ago. "In the first two years of starting this online drive, we notched up only 5 000 sales - but this figure has now jumped to 30 000, which is a 600% growth in two years. We are expecting this figure to rise significantly in the next few years. because many of our clients are now seeing the value of placing orders 24x7," he said
Esquire is currently one of only a few distributors in South Africa which offers an online ordering facility for all the products it distributes.
"We are extremely bullish with our six-fold increase in online sales. All the hard work and sleepless nights that it took to populate the Web site with content and information relevant for each product is starting to bear fruit, with the growing amount of orders being placed online."
Esquire has also developed and pioneered the world's first virtual reseller network (VRN), with its own subsidiary, ImproWeb, an e-commerce solutions company.
Currently, over 500 resellers are plugged into the Esquire back-end, which allows them to trade with their own e-commerce Web sites, using Esquire's infrastructure.
Earlier this year, the company's VRN won an international award - the EMEA Channel Academy Multichannel Initiative of the Year Award for 2014. The EMEA Channel Academy 2014 Awards took place in Monaco in February - in conjunction with the regional event, DISTREE EMEA. Distributors, retailers and vendors operating in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region submitted application packs to enter the Multichannel Initiative award.
A VIP jury of international channel experts met in Monaco to assess the submitted entries. The VIP jury selected Esquire's world first VRN as the winner of the 2014 Multichannel Initiative Award.
"We are definitely seeing that people and companies are feeling much more comfortable - and eager - to buy online. Revenue from online sales is already sitting at 10% of our total revenue, with this expected to rise to 20% by 2016."
Commenting further, Cassim said that by joining the Esquire VRN, resellers were provided with immediate access to the company's entire stock-holding, without having to invest in stock. "This is a totally different way of conducting business in the distribution channel. Our VRN resellers don't have to hold any stock. They have immediate access to our stock - which is updated every few minutes. As we update our stock, our resellers are given immediate access to this new stock as well.
"This is going to make a significant impact on the e-commerce space in South Africa," he said.
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