Distributor Esquire Technologies has announced it has reached a milestone of 30 000 online orders placed on its Web site to date.
Esquire distributes a range of IT, mobility, digital and consumer lifestyle products from international vendors, and currently has about 500 resellers signed up to its online reseller network.
Mahomed Cassim, CEO of Esquire Technologies, explains that the company commenced online sales four years ago.
“In the first two years of starting this online drive we notched up only 5 000 sales – but this figure has now jumped to 30 000, which is a 600% growth in two years. We are expecting this figure to rise significantly in the next few years. because many of our clients are now seeing the value of placing orders 24/7,” he says.
Esquire is currently one of only a few distributors in South Africa which offers an online ordering facility for all the products it distributes.
“We are extremely bullish with our six-fold increase in online sales,” says Cassim. “All the hard work and sleepless nights that it took to populate the Web site with content and information relevant for each product is starting to bear fruit with the growing amount of orders being placed online.”
Esquire has also developed and pioneered what it believes is the world’s first virtual reseller network (VRN), with its e-commerce subsidiary, ImproWeb.
Currently, more than 500 resellers are plugged into the Esquire backend, which allows them to trade with their own e-commerce Web sites, using Esquire’s Infrastructure.
Earlier this year the company’s VRN won an international award – the EMEA Channel Academy Multichannel Initiative of the Year Award for 2014.
“We are definitely seeing that people and companies are feeling much more comfortable – and eager – to buy online. Revenue from online sales is already sitting at 10% of our total revenue, with this expected to rise to 20% by 2016,” says Cassim.
