With online shopping steadily increasing all over the world, the 2014 festive season yielded positive growth for many online shopping sites.
South African online retailer Loot.co.za achieved an average 62% year-on-year growth in a number of their general merchandise categories. The online customer journey is becoming increasingly mobile, and Loot.co.za saw 40% of its festive season traffic coming via mobile phones and tablets. The company’s year-on-year revenue growth via mobile phones was 300%.
CEO Gary Hadfield comments: “We are very happy with our festive season trading results. We wanted to tick all the boxes over this peak period, and we did! With strong growth, ROI focused on marketing spend, as well as 96% of our parcels being delivered within the specified delivery times and customer registration went up by 48%, we’ve got good reasons to feel very positive about the year ahead for Loot.co.za.”
Loot.co.za’s business model focuses on the breadth and depth of their product ranges, sourcing great deals and delivering a great customer experience. In the run up to the festive season, the retailer made the shift to a responsive site enabling an improved mobile shopping experience. Over the past year, Loot.co.za launched four new categories ensuring that Outdoor, Arts & Crafts, Pets and Home offerings were available for festive season shoppers.
Loot.co.za offers over 10-million products across 17 categories.
Hadfield attributes the success of the business to its focus on building an online business of substance and its ethos of making a contribution to a sustainable trading environment in the South African e-commerce industry. “We source great deals for our customers in the context of also building a profitable, healthy value-chain to foster a thriving online ecosystem.”
Loot.co.za’s Black Friday deals helped to boost revenue growth over the festive period with specials on the Huawei 4Africa Ascend W1 Smartphone, the Canon PIXMA MX394 4-in-1 Multifunction Inkjet Printer and Remington Titanium-X Rotary Shaver proving to be top sellers in the Electronics, Computer and Home categories respectively.
In other popular categories, Books and Music, the best sellers included recipe books from Tim Noakes The Real Meal Revolution, Nigella Lawson’s Nigellissima recipe book, and the album that reached 4-million sales in just 12 weeks – Taylor Swift’s 1989. In preparation for summer the top sellers were the Oztrail Pop Up Beach Dome and Afritrail Cabo Beach Shelter in the Outdoor category.
