Owners of shopping cart web sites can create automatic product feeds onto bobshop.co.za, ensuring a wider audience for their merchandise

Do you already have a shopping cart web site?

If you answered “yes”, congratulations. It means that you know how to use technology to grow your business. You already know that online shopping is the way to go. You have positioned your business to take advantage of the fact that more and more consumers are turning to the internet, where they can shop 24 hours a day from the comfort of their home, buy difficult to find items at the click of a mouse and quickly get all the information they need.

Statistical data in South Africa is not readily available, but the experts estimate that online sales from local businesses were set to hit over R1 billion in 2008. It is believed that online retail (excluding sales of airline tickets) accounts for only about half a percent of total retail sales, which compares poorly to the USA figure of about 5 percent. The lack and cost of broadband access is seen as the main reason for South Africa lagging in the sphere of internet shopping. That could change soon, as more and more South Africans gain access to internet thanks to the new undersea cables.

Already in 2009 the number of South African internet users has passed five million for the first time, breaking through the 10 percent mark in Internet penetration for the country. Strong growth is expected to continue in 2010, and by the end of the year we should reach the six million mark. By 2014, well over nine million South Africans should have internet access.

More internet users quickly translate into more online shoppers. That is why now more than ever it becomes important (a) to have a shopping cart web site and (b) to form alliances in order to position your e-commerce well.

For these reasons, you should align your shopping cart with bobshop, because bobshop.co.za is a high-volume web site. Having a presence on Bob Shop means getting more exposure and reaching a wider audience. Take a look at these figures:

• bobshop has almost 450,000 registered users. Every month, between ten and fifteen thousand new users register on Bob Shop.
• bobshop has over 1,100,000 unique visitors every month.
• bobshop generates over 26 million page impressions every month.

As a business person, you know what that means. You know it means that every one of those 450,000 users – nay, every one of those 1.1 million visitors – can end up as your customer.

It does not matter if you never sold anything on Bob Shop before. The registration procedure is quick and easy. The learning curve is relatively low. With a few clicks of a computer mouse – on your end and on our end too – the products will start streaming from your shopping cart onto your Bob Shop seller’s profile. 

If you are already a seller on Bob Shop who happens to also own a shopping cart web site – just imagine what you stand to gain after you integrate your cart with your trading platform! No more need to spend hours uploading items; all the items from your shopping cart that you select will be fed automatically onto your Bob Shop seller’s profile. That frees your time to focus on acquiring new stock, following trends in your chosen field, processing orders, servicing customers. Indeed, a whole new world of opportunities opens up for you.

And how do you go about integrating your shopping cart with the Bob Shop online marketplace?

Contact our category managers at categoryadmin(at)Bob Shop(dot)co(dot)za. Very soon, products from your shopping cart will start flowing onto Bob Shop, available to the entire Bob Shop community.

We are always keen to speak to our existing and prospective users. Regardless of whether you already transact on Bob Shop or not, we would love to hear from you and discuss integrating your existing e-commerce web site into Bob Shop