(23 March 2011) Each month, about eight thousand people sell their products on South Africa’s largest online marketplace, bobshop.co.za. The latest figures reveal that goods to the value of over R30-million exchange hands on a monthly basis on the vibrant online platform. Jaco Jonker, Bob Shop CEO, says that many Bob Shop sellers make use of the site as a sustainable means of generating an income.

“We are very proud of the fact that Bob Shop, now in its twelfth year of existence, has become a viable platform for earning a living for so many people, because it offers a way to set up a new business quickly, with very little investment and with minimal overheads.  That is especially important in a country like South Africa, with so many unemployed,” says Jonker.

Jonker points out that the Bob Shop platform is flexible enough to accommodate full time sellers, part time sellers, and from-time-to-time sellers. “They can make use of many sophisticated tools usually restricted to bigger businesses, including the ability to accept online credit card payments. They can also expose their products to the very large Bob Shop online audience”, he says.

The site has a section of its blog featuring several Bob Shop sellers’ success stories. For many of them, Bob Shop has been a life-line. Jaco Jonker cites the example of a seller who, after finding himself retrenched and without any capital, turned to selling eBooks; an artist who prefers to let the buyers decide what they want to pay for her artwork, than to let it collect dust; a mother who sells jewellery nationwide from her home in a small town; a seller of electronic goods who stumbled upon Bob Shop as a buyer and, little by little, graduated to a full-time seller.

“For them all, Bob Shop provides a means to earn a decent living. It allows them to access a large number of customers. It also gives them a ready-made sophisticated technology infrastructure at a low cost’” says Jonker.

A great majority of Bob Shop sellers are from South Africa, although there are people as far off as Hong Kong and the USA selling on the site.