Shopping through the Internet seems to be finding favour with South African consumers, as online retailers report massive increases for the recent festive season when compared to previous years` results.
"We had a great festive period, recording a 250% increase over the year before, which is even more than the 200% mark we were hoping for," says Fiona Phillips, CEO of Cybercellar.
"Things have died down now - although that is normal for early January, when everyone has spent their hard-earned money over December - but nonetheless, our Christmas period has been nothing short of fabulous."
She says Cybercellar`s export side improved a lot over the period, despite the strengthening of the rand.
"Although our local market remains important to us, we have found that our growth in exports has been exponential, especially to the US. For this year, we will be looking into growing new markets, as we have received a number of enquiries from all over the world."
A spokesman for wholesale chain Makro says the company is "very pleased" with sales over the Christmas period.
"We had an increase of 300% on the previous year, which was down to several factors. Firstly, we went live with eBucks in mid-December, and there was a massive response to this.
"Secondly, we improved our call centre service considerably, which helped a lot. It`s always nice for customers to have someone to call if there are problems or queries," he says.
For 2003, Makro plans to focus on further developing its delivery and customer service operations.
Streetcar.com`s MD, Roan Hammond, says that while the company improved on the previous season`s profits, it didn`t quite reach the heights he had anticipated.
"Our corporate side of the business was very strong, but the consumer side didn`t quite have the growth we had hoped for. Based on our return on investment - we invested a fair bit of money into consumer awareness - we didn`t do as well as we expected.
"However, on the corporate side, we had a strong level of purchases coming through until two days before Christmas, even though we expected that side of the business to taper off a lot earlier."
He says that in terms of the next 12 months, streetcar.com will funnel a large percentage of its resources into further developing its corporate end.
"At the same time, we know that our consumer side of the business is quite new, so we will have to play around with it over the next two quarters and feel out the market more acutely," he says.
M-Web Shopping enjoyed a huge improvement on the previous festive season, according to Anton Gaylard, GM of M-Web`s ASP Division.
"Over the period from 1 November to 31 December, we recorded a 174% increase in our figures. A lot of our merchants did better than anticipated, and I feel that the reason for this is that the public are becoming more comfortable with transacting online.
"With the growth of Internet banking, there has been more acceptance of online shopping as a way of doing business, so we expect further growth next Christmas."
He says that for the next festive season, merchants need to focus on improving delivery times - those that had 24- or 48-hour delivery periods were still doing business until just before Christmas - and they should also start promoting Christmas earlier and educating the buying public about online shopping.
"Shopping for gifts on the Internet is the simple solution to getting gifts to friends or family in other parts of the country, so I believe there is still plenty of room for further growth in this medium, particularly as more people become familiar with the concept of online transacting," says Gaylard.
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