I was already fascinated by e-commerce before it was called e-commerce when I began writing about the internet and what you could do with the internet.

I began tracking e-commerce in South Africa in 1996 when we picked up the first sales that were beginning to happen. A lot of it was people choosing something from a catalogue on a website and then emailing or phoning the company to ask for the product. So it wasn't true e-commerce in most cases, it was internet-enabled retail rather than e-commerce or online retail that was happening.

One of the mysteries of e-commerce in this country back in the years 2000 and 2001 was how much was being invested in e-commerce websites. There was a litany of failed investments in e-commerce and the amounts that were spent were massive - R40 million here, R80 million there - with very little return to show for it. So why was there no real return on those investments? Why weren't people flocking to these sites with the heavy marketing going into them, the obvious convenience and, very often, the price benefits of these websites? What was the issue?

This year, we released Online Retail in South Africa 2021 and it's probably the most significant of all our online retail and e-commerce reports, which we've released since 1998, when the predecessor company to World Wide Worx, which was called Media Africa, released the first e-commerce study in South Africa.

First, let's delve a little further into the revolution and the elements that are revolutionary. One of the biggest revolutions within the broader e-commerce revolution was the normalisation of online shopping across age groups. Because up to 2018, only around 3.5% of South Africans were shopping online regularly. It was a tiny proportion compared to what people imagined was happening and that's why the numbers are so low. But what you saw within that 3.5% or so was a vast age disparity.

Behind the success story of Sixty60 was a series of steps that were taken that contributed to small successes that added up to that big success. The starting point was an innovation division that's been created within the Shoprite Group called Shoprite X and among other things, they came up with the Shoprite Checkers Savings and Rewards programme that has also been quite transformative for the brand. 

The other side of experience is the ability to delight people in terms of how you deliver your service or your product to them. So in the online environment, the classic example that we have now is Checkers Sixty60. 

We need a massive focus, firstly, on reducing red tape. And this is something the government has talked about for almost 20 years. We were part of a project in the early 2000s looking at what needed to be done to eliminate red tape, and none of that has been done. In the meantime, we've had all kinds of proposals for additional red tape which, fortunately, have been squashed over time.

There is definitely a trajectory, and it's going to continue for a few years, but the curve will flatten. We are coming off a far higher base - in 2018, it was 14 billion, in 2020 it was 30 billion so that's a doubling. But if you were to take the same level of growth that we've had from 2018 to 2020, which was about 16 billion, and add it to what we have now, the percentage is obviously a lot lower.

The first key piece of advice for a small retailer is that their physical outlet and their physical presence in that outlet still remain the biggest differentiator. So if you're a big personality in a small store, that personality is going to attract people to the store and you can't replicate that online, so don't even try.