Online developers, online retail shops, innovators and technology gurus are invited to the biannual Online Retailing Conference to be held in Cape Town on October 10 and 11.
The event brings together stakeholders to discuss and showcase solutions meant to help in enhancing online retailing.
This comes at a time when only 0.5 percent of total shopping in South Africa happens online. This is a drop in the ocean although it has not discouraged budding entrepreneurs from exploring the option.
In an earlier research done in 2011, by Google’s ThinkInsights, South Africans still preferred the brick and mortar stores to online stores.
Some of the challenges they experienced was that they like the personal touch and entering a store and viewing the product. Trust issues were also expressed with majority of the respondents admitting they were scared of being ripped off.
HumanIPO has recently covered online e-commerce sites as eShop and CitySlicker, a group buying service. There are numerous retail shops like BidorBuy which still operate in the country. The numbers of online customers might be worrying but the trend is changing.
Event organisers observed that this year’s event will be highlighting the most important aspects regarding on-line retailing such as trends impacting on on-line retailing, Omni channel retailing, Multi-channel approach to growing on-line, the CPA and retail; and convenient and secure payments for Internet shoppers.
As usual, the conference will be hosting high profile speakers including the Industry Manager for Google, Avinesh Pillay, Manuel Koser who is the cofounder and Managing Director of Zando (an ecommerce site), Craig Ballantyne the Managing director for FastMoving and many more invited guests and speakers.
Participants can register and book a place at the conference from the official website.
