The new amalgamated company, now known as Bob Group, will now offer merchants a complete set of e-commerce services, including payments, logistics and marketplace.
The co-founder of uAfrica Andy Higgins, who also founded bidorbuy in 1999, said the merger of the two companies made sense as competition was tightening up with the entrance of new international players in the market.
Higgins was referring to the bid by US retail giant Walmart to buy out SA-based Massmart while another US behemoth, Amazon, is launching in South Africa next year.
The arrival of these companies means the market will get saturated as local e-commerce platforms such as Loot, Takealot and Zando already enjoy a degree of dominance.
Established in 1999, bidorbuy has grown to become one of South Africa's foremost online shopping destinations. According to the company’s website, the platform has grown both in terms of user base and the range and number of products on offer. “Bidorbuy has withstood the hardest test of them all, the test of time, to prove its viability and usefulness in the South African ecommerce landscape. South Africa's largest online shopping and auction marketplace,” it states.
The Covid-19 pandemic also saw a significant increase in e-commerce as sales spiked due to lockdown restrictions and customers anxious to prevent the spread of the virus, said Higgins.
He added that the establishment of Bob Group would hopefully contribute to breaking through e-commerce in South Africa, which in his view was still very much lagging even most of its developing country counterparts.
“And so we think the way to do that is to take the historic brand and what bidorbuy has achieved in the market as a marketplace together with the expertise of uAfrica, which is specifically around shipping in the logistics side of e-commerce, which is critical,” he said.
“We believe for any e-commerce operation to succeed combining those two and with some other points of differentiation to also make our mark on the e-commerce space in South Africa.”
Where others in South Africa’s e-commerce environment have embraced a centralised logistics model, Bob Group’s competitive advantage comes from its decentralised approach, allowing it to price services much more competitively.
Globally, the general practice in the marketplace business has been using big centralised warehousing points to have third-party merchants' products delivered to these warehouses before they are dispatched to the buyer.
The Bob Group’s offering includes a tool that allows merchants to sync products from their online store to bidorbuy, a real-time solution for updates to products and inventory, shipping and tracking solutions, a payment facilitator for buyers to pay with their preferred payment option, and a software-as-a-service solution providing technology for courier companies to run their entire business.
Craig Lubbe, the chief executive of bidorbuy, said where previously the company had focused exclusively on the marketplace, this amalgamation would allow it to provide merchant-empowering tools across all the sales channels they are active on, including their own website and third-party channels.
“Basically, merchants can now get multiple quotes from about six different courier companies and then choose based on which courier is best suited for that particular delivery,” he said.
“For merchants, this will mean spending less time on pulling together all the strands of an online business and better shopping experiences for buyers at every stage of the process, from search to payment to delivery.
“What we are trying to do is different in that we want to provide that logistic service between the seller and the buyer directly without having to go through another whole piece of handling and picking and packing,” Lubbe added.
“We believe we can offer something that's more efficient and cost effective by going straight from the merchant to the customer.”
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