Vaimo’s new office in South Africa is one of four new points of presence established in the past six months, along with the UK, Australia and Canada. Vaimo delivers solutions based on Magento, a powerful open-source e-commerce platform that underpins over 110 000 online retail sites around the world.
Over 400 Magento solution providers gathered in Las Vegas for the annual event, and only twenty awards are made every year. The Fast and Emerging Partner award was presented to Vaimo who showed remarkable year to year growth in 2011 – a result of their dedication to the development of their Magento Enterprise practice and excellence in Magento Enterprise implementations.
SA is shifting to shopping online
“As a 2011 Fast and Emerging Partner Award winner, Vaimo showed great expansion in their Magento Enterprise business demonstrating their commitment to delivering creative and quality Magento Enterprise stores,” says Scott Dahlgren, head of Magento channel sales.
South Africa is enthusiastically shifting its shopping habits online – in a world wide Worx/Mastercard study released in April, almost every category of goods and service has seen an increase in its proportion of offline sales to online, and the number of Internet users who shop online is growing steadily. Online retail has become a R2.63 billion annual business, growing consistently at 20-30% over the last few years.
Vaimo COO Brendan Peo is making substantial inroads into new markets, aiming to bring its international best practices into rapidly developing emerging markets. “One of the major issues contributing to poorly performing webshops is the lack of innovation and creativity. Just as successful retailers in shopping malls put a huge amount of work into making their shop fronts welcoming and merchandise appealing, webshop owners must work to draw in customers, and encourage them to get all the way to the point where they click ‘confirm my transaction’,” says Peo.
Webshop must serve customers
What makes a good webshop is a design which caters to the nuances of the sector for which it is designed, but also takes into account the thought processes of customers, and why they click ‘buy’. “We don’t see the webshop as some technical platform. The webshop is the salesperson. It has to be there to serve customers around the clock, answer their questions, make recommendations for up-selling and cross-selling, convincing them that what they see is so desirable, all without annoying or confusing the customer,” he explains.
As a result, a good webshop goes beyond choosing standard themes and one-size-fits-all user interfaces, says Peo. “Vaimo works with its clients to understand the psychology of the person coming to the site. The user interface and the integration into back end systems, such as ERP, are all done as a bespoke solution geared for high-performance e-commerce,” he explains.
