Andrew Smith
Pioneering E-Commerce

E-commerce, for us, was this dream of selling a product, selling something that we could work on, and we might have to work really hard on it, but once we built it, it would gain momentum. It would create a momentum of its own and we could sell something that wasn't our time. About 2005 is when we first started to think about e-commerce. 

We thought that there was a gap in the South African market between the products that existed internationally, or even locally, but not in the shops that everyone was visiting. Could we use online, use e-commerce to offer products that weren't as easily available and sell them to customers?

I think that the major components of success is that we sold products that people wanted and they couldn't necessarily get somewhere else. We chose brands and products that, if you wanted one, you wouldn't know where to get it and so you would search for it online. Even if you didn't know what Yuppiechef was, you recognized this product.

We had to build things ourselves and, fortunately, Shane was from a design background and I was from a development background so we could do it ourselves, but it took a really long time.

We built the Yuppiechef website as a site that we would want to use. What information would we want on the product page? Trying to have empathy, trying to put ourselves in the shoes of a customer to say, if I was on this page, looking at this picture, would I know how big it was? Or would I want to know what it was made of?

I think our lesson in inflection points is that each thing on its own is not necessarily going to move the needle, but all of them together are going to do that. Slowly, one customer after another coming on board, building up momentum over time.

We don't obsess about competitors. We don't spend all of our time necessarily analyzing them or watching their every move, but we do have to say, as a company, that we're going to try and be something different.

One of the things I think you have to be careful with when it comes to apps, is that there are a certain number of apps on your own phone that you use all the time, and then there is the long tail of apps that you've installed and used once and never used again. Unless you have a really compelling reason to believe that your app is going to be used all the time, or at least very, very regularly, it's going to kind of slip off the homepage of your customer's phone and then probably get ignored and never used.

We have done email newsletters from the beginning and it still continues to work. It works for us and works for our market. I think that building a newsletter database of actual people who've said, "Yes, I would like to hear from you regularly", there's still nothing that compares with email as a channel for that.

E-commerce is not easy. It's incredibly hard. There are a couple of things that make e-commerce challenging. Firstly, a lot of retail exists, with what I call a geographic monopoly. The second part that makes e-commerce challenging is that it's not a very mature "industry" yet in South Africa.