Sales are booming on existing e-commerce sites and new sites are popping up, but even so, many customers are abandoning their carts before checkout. While platforms have improved over the past 10 years, "many are still getting it so wrong", says Louw van Riet, MD of e-Commerce Development SA. "You must do everything to not frustrate the user."Market research provider Euromonitor International identifies the top e-commerce players in SA in terms of sales as Naspers (Takealot.com), Pick n Pay, Apple, Mr Price Group, Woolworths and HomeChoice. But their domination may be under threat. With the Covid-19 lockdown, Van Riet has seen new e-commerce sites proliferate. "What the new sites offer is a better user experience." This, he says, is because new platforms such as Shopify offer better design, artificial intelligence, better indexing and most importantly, a clean data set - data that is accurate, complete, consistent and uniform. When data is collected from a vari...
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