Online shopping has transformed the way we shop and is growing at unprecedented rates. A task that was once high effort, has become one of very low effort. In South Africa especially, online retail has more than doubled over the last couple of years, thanks to the explosion in demand for home deliveries brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Do you know how far back it started? It was way back in 1979 when Michael Aldrich used a two-way message service called Teletext to revolutionise business. Then from the UK, in 1981, Thomson holidays gave us the first online business to business transaction. 1982, Mintel was used to make online purchases, book train tickets, chat, check stock prices etc. Then the first ever shopper bought online at a Tesco store, in 1984.
Take a leap forward to 1970, to when Tim Berners-Lee created the first browser and web server. By 1991, the Internet had become commercialised and saw the birth of online shopping. Amazon started selling books online and eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar. Both companies are still top ‘go to’ places for purchasing online throughout the world. In 1998 Paypal was founded.
In South Africa, we saw a 66% growth in shopping online in 2020. Today, two years after the Covid-19 pandemic, 70% of South Africans are shopping this convenient way. The big e-commerce players like Takealot and Superbalist, which were doing well pre-pandemic, experienced a rapid growth spike in sales as more consumers took the online shopping route. Takealot officially launched in June 2011, the business was previously known as ‘Take2’. Today, Takealot is a leading e-commerce retailer in South Africa and one of the largest, most innovative ecommerce retailers on the African continent.
No more crowds, with access to advanced digital technology, contactless payment methods and high-speed internet. Shopping online essentially saves us time and money.
Goodbye shopping malls, hello convenience!
