A 2013 survey of online shopping habits by MasterCard Worldwide reveals online retail in South Africa is growing by more than 30 percent annually [1]. As Africa’s leading online retailer of electronics, toys, appliances, games and books, Kalahari.com will leverage the hybris Commerce Suite to respond to growth opportunities and further extend its market share in the fast growing Southern African commerce market.
Providing a true omni-channel experience, the scalability of the hybris Commerce platform will enable kalahari.com to support its rapidly expanding online operations, which include consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and business-to-consumer (B2C) retail, and deliver a feature-rich experience to a growing number of mobile shoppers. This will include selling digital goods such as eBooks, via kalahari.com’s own e-reader device the Gobii, and a large expansion of its online catalog of digital and physical goods. According to a recent survey published by kalahari.com, mobile shopping in South Africa is being fuelled by the uptake of tablet devices, with 70 percent of tablet owners now using their devices to shop online [2].
Owned by MIH Internet Holdings, a Naspers company that specializes in e-commerce platforms, kalahari.com realized its existing e-commerce system would not be able to scale to support its fast growing business strategy.
“All our retail businesses and especially kalahari.com are highly customer centric, hence a large part of our IT focus is on delivering core platforms that enable the business to deliver the best customer experiences. At large scale and across a continent, this becomes particularly challenging, but with hybris in place we have a foundation to build upon that will free up up our IT teams to focus on the more innovative edge of our customer offering going forward,” explains Michael Needham CTO MIH E-Commerce Africa and Middle East
Alongside delivering the capability to cope with rapidly increasing data and transaction volumes, the hybris Commerce Suite will enable kalahari.com to respond quickly to changing market or consumer demands while simultaneously reducing site management and development costs.
“With cloud and mobile technology a strong focus we needed a flexible core e-commerce framework at the heart of our many systems that make up our platform,” continues Needham. “The online technology universe is evolving at such a rapid rate, we needed a platform with a solid architecture, and a strong set of tools that allow the business teams autonomy in controlling the site’s offering without heavy involvement from IT”
Moritz Zimmerman, CTO of hybris commented: “Retailers like kalahari.com are racing to meet the increasing demands of modern consumers, who are looking to buy both digital and physical goods in one place, and the hybris Commerce suite will enable global merchants to meet these objectives by developing and deploying advanced commerce solutions more quickly and through more touchpoints than ever before. We are delighted that hybris will be a key driver in taking kalahari.com to its next growth plane.”
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