Five insider secrets for your e-commerce store

E-commerce in South Africa is ready for explosion, with customers growing in confidence and new online stores opening every day. There are many new technologies and suppliers emerging, but sorting the good from the bad is often only learnt through painful experience.

Here are five service providers that we have settled on after a few years of testing with our local online stores, Yuppiechef, Flag Kit and Bug Zapper.

Hosting: Hetzner
Hosting a website in South Africa is not cheap, and many local webmasters choose to host internationally in order to save on costs. I believe that if your e-commerce site is targeting South African customers you need to house it within our borders for two reasons:

Speed
Until the long-expected undersea cables arrive (and probably still afterwards), local sites are going to respond faster than international sites. After spending marketing money getting a visitor to your site, don’t give them a reason to leave!
Localised search engines
Google.co.za returns different results to Google.com. South African surfers are automatically directed to Google.co.za based on their IP address, and South African websites are given preference in the results. Google uses the IP address of your website’s server to determine if it’s South African.

We have used Hetzner for hosting all of our e-commerce sites, and it is possibly our best supplier across all our cost centres. Its customer support, technical expertise and even billing systems make dealing with it a pleasure. Hetzner offers shared hosting (cheap, but you share the server with other sites), managed servers (you own the whole server, but they take care of everything technical) and root servers (you own the server and set up the software, but they take care of the hardware).

Newsletter sending: Campaign Monitor
Email newsletters appear simple on the surface, and most developers feel like they can bang out a few lines of code that will send out their monthly newsletter. Sure, the mails will leave your server, but will they ever arrive at the destination? A specialist newsletter company like Campaign Monitor spends all day talking to the major ISPs such as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo! so that its mail servers are recognised as legitimate senders of bulk email. It constantly monitors blacklists, and sends from a different IP address if one of its servers is listed by mistake. It also gets to spend much more time working on reporting, personalisation, segmentation and other cool features that your few lines of PHP probably won’t have.

It costs money to send a newsletter with a third party, but it is a fraction of the cost of the other advertising channels that your company will use, and your email database is far more valuable to you.

Live chat: Provide Support
Despite the dream of an e-commerce site that “makes money while you sleep”, real customers like to speak to real people before handing over their cash to strangers. Many online shoppers can’t be bothered to pick up the phone, but they’ve also been disappointed by poor (or non-existent) email response times. They have their credit card in hand and your website has done a great job in selling your widget, but the potential customer just wants to know one tiny detail before buying. Enter “live chat”, which is a bit like instant messaging between a customer and a company. The visitor clicks on a link and chats to a customer service person in a little browser window.

We use Provide Support because it has all the features we need and it’s cost effective. The monthly cost is easily covered by the first sale that we make that wouldn’t have been possible without this form of communication. Customers who make use of it are usually a long way down the buying cycle, so spending a few minutes chatting is enough to tip them over the edge. It’s seriously impressive when one of us is working late at night and we are available to take a chat with a customer who “calls” — they usually comment that they’ve never seen anything like that in South Africa!

Courier: Borntosend
If you’re selling a physical product you’ll probably need a courier company for delivery. Our experience with a few of the big names (Berco, FedEx et cetera) was not great. We felt like a tiny customer walking into massive wholesaler like Makro, and expecting someone to care about our lost package. We now deal with Borntosend, which effectively buys in bulk from the courier companies and then focuses entirely on customer service. Our parcels are still picked up and delivered by Dawn Wing or DHL, but we deal with Borntosend, which knows us by name and fights on our behalf. Oh, and an added bonus — our rates with Borntosend are cheaper than when we approached Dawn Wing directly!

Site Search: Google
I remember trying to search for “milk” on one of South Africa’s major grocery shopping sites, and the first page of results contained everything from “milk of magnesium” to “Mr Whistle’s milk cat chews”, but no milk from a cow! Searching for products has the power to increase conversion rates dramatically, or it can be a major turn-off. Most website owners are stuck with a simple database query that pulls out every page that mentions the keyword, and returns the results in random order.

Who better to take care of your search needs than the undisputed champion, Google? It has a product called Site Search, which, for $100 a year, lets your visitors search only pages from your site, and the results are displayed as if it were your own in-house search functionality. Because the technology has been built by 1 000 Google PhD rocket scientists, it just works. The best pages from your site will appear for each search phrase every time, but if you disagree you can even influence the results where needed.

Learning from each other
There is still much work to be done, and I hope that local e-commerce developers and marketers can share what they have learned in order to raise the level of all of our efforts. I’m sure some of my peers will disagree with what I have written, and I hope they do! Leave a comment below and we can all have our horizons expanded a bit.