Alternative shopping for South African retail

Whilst common in most first world countries, South Africa is yet to truly explore the opportunities of alternative retailing. I.E.: shopping over the phone or on the Internet. Only a handful of South African retail brands are selling their goods online and almost none have targeted the telephone as the medium of purchase.

These alternative avenues of doing business can greatly benefit retailers who are now able to target consumers who may never walk into their store, says Garin Toren, marketing director at digitalmall.com.

"The biggest hurdle to voice or Internet commerce is the cost of setting up the necessary call centre, transaction, logistical / delivery and online infrastructure required to sell products in this way."

Now digitalmall.com has created `WorldShop`, a department store within its Internet Shopping Mall: www.digitalmall.com, enabling retailers to buy an aisle / department within the department store and trade their goods online and over the phone. Worldshop will be made up of various well-known retail brands residing under one `roof`. The goods available within Worldshop can be purchased online or through a centralised telesales line. Digitalmall takes care of all transactional facilities, customer service, delivery and every other aspect of the purchase.

By sharing the infrastructure and costs of a single store across various retailers, the risk of leveraging these mediums is vastly reduced. This is an ideal mechanism for the well known, but not massive, local retailer to take advantage of something previously only available to the `big 50` mass retailers in South Africa. " It`s a perfect way to pilot an initiative of this sort without incurring huge risk", says Toren

"Once a retailer is successfully profiting in WorldShop, it could grow into a full retail offering with its own individual presence in Digitalmall.com."

Digitalmall is targeting a wide variety of branded retailers - those that you would walk past in any of our shopping centres. " It seems that the second-tier retailers have been looking for an opportunity that is cost effective while maintaining levels of service and efficiency. The most important factor to everyone we have spoken to, is the completeness of the Worldshop offering."

" The construction of Worldshop is complete and November saw the beginning of our drive to fill the departments. So far the response has been amazing and we look forward to a launch early in the New Year."