The latest HTML5 browsers, and mobile operating systems (Android & iOS) offer great technology for storing data locally on your device until there is a stable connection for sending the data up to a server. This is called local caching, and can be enormously powerful in low bandwidth areas such as South Africa.

The data is stored on a local database (Either in the browser or smartphone database), which can then be synchronised with a cloud based server (Like Amazon Cloud Storage) when a connection is available. The data can consist of video, data, or images and the device can also send low file-size data on a unstable connection and only send high-filesize items once a stable connection or wifi connection is established.

Want to discuss how this technology can be used in your business? Refresh has built several apps utilising this functionality, so please give us a shout to discuss!

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Life Child assists these children with educational support, health and nutritional support, spiritual development, social development, recreational opportunities, and assistance with self-sustainability. The outcome is to restore communities for generational change.

The new website provides a subscription based donation facility to offer financial support to children or other projects run by Life Child International. Donations are redirected to the various cost centres around the world, and subscriptions are all fully managed via the customers accounts area.

We welcome your support to this great initiative by providing a monthly or once-off donation on the Life Child Website here.

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A traditional eCommerce store requires that the store owner builds up the inventory themselves, which can be time consuming and costly if the stock needs to be purchased on-hand. Using the marketplace style model, a store owner is responsible for attracting customers, and keeping track of the transactions through the store, while the vendor is responsible for manufacturing the products, and shipping them to the customer.

A marketplace store also has potentially much lower startup costs, and due to the larger inventory usually much more sales volume than a standard eCommerce store.

Lower Financial Risk

Marketplaces tend to have a more positive cash flow due to the lower initial stock investment costs, with the vendor holding stock and manufacturing the products. Payments to the store owner are usually based on percentages of the transactions, which can then be re-invested into the company.

Volumes

eCommerce marketplaces are usually intended to have high volumes of sales due to their large stock sizes across many product categories.

The volumes also allow a store to engage in long tail online marketing, which means the store will show up for many very specific (non competitive) product searches, ensuring many listings on the search engines and potential sales across different industries.

Scalability

As the owners of the marketplace generally do not need to have stock on hand, scaling the marketplace is a lot more cost effective if traffic increases to the store and more vendors are brought on-board to meet demand. If a good on-boarding process is setup for new vendors, most of this can be automated to rapidly build the store inventory.

Industry Specific B2B

Marketplaces are often focused on a particular industry, doing business to business eCommerce with the intention of disrupting an industry normally used to doing business offline. These replace a more traditional manual ordering process, and if refined can have a great impact on the chosen industry by automating typical tasks through the marketplace system.

Price Comparisons

Many marketplace stores encourage competition between vendors, ultimately leaving the decision to the customer about which product they would like to purchase based on price, vendor reviews, and location.

Store owners often evaluate the efficiency of their vendors, and may promote some vendors based on their service delivery to the customer.

Customer Service

Good customer service is essential for any style of eCommerce store, however in marketplace eCommerce a store owner very often just needs to provide a mediator role to ensure the transaction between seller and buyer takes place without any issues.

Vendor ratings can also encourage better customer service within a marketplace, with vendors competing with another to provide better service, and customers selecting vendors based on their ratings.

Technical Considerations

Marketplace eCommerce stores can involve more complex development tasks than a standard store, especially when it comes to the inventory setup, price comparisons, and shipping functions.

However when using an experienced development partner, and choosing the right platform and add-ons, the marketplace should go off without a hitch!

Both Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce have solutions to implement marketplace solutions. We tend to recommend Magento at this point, however Shopify is making great strides in this direction.

Have a look at our eCommerce platform comparisons here for more information.

Get your Marketplace Online!

Refresh has been involved in several eCommerce marketplaces, within the manufacturing industry, clothing and pharmaceutical industry.

Contact us today for advice on how to get started with your eCommerce store.

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1. Create many landing pages

More landing pages result in more targeted content to your product or service. Too many products and services on a single landing page results in some targeted information displayed below the fold. When an ad is clicked and the product is not immediately visible, a large amount of users hit the back button assuming the page is not relevant to their search and the interaction will be lost.

2. Less is more

Remove any information that is not directly related to what you are trying to accomplish. Keep your text and images to the point.

2. Remove unnecessary links

Many landing pages have taken to removing the main navigation completely. These links lead to distraction and they may abandon the page without converting.

3. Headlines matter

Match your headline to your call to action. When people click an ad and don’t immediately see the product or service offered they lose trust and feel confusion. Many will just hit the back button and disappear forever into the interwebs.

4. Related media

Ensure the media you display is directly related to the service/product you are offering. An example of your work for instance, for a portfolio site.

5. Shorten your forms

People won’t fill out forms that appear to be time consuming. Only ask for what you need and if you require a lot of fields, make the form appear shorter by reducing the spacing between fields. The less space your form covers on the page the less you appear to be asking for. The form and call to action should still stand out clearly.

6. Testimonials work

Include testimonials to reduce user anxiety, and create social proof.

7. Add proof elements

People have become resistant to handing out their details because it leads to spam. Offer a privacy message or a link to a privacy policy so the visitors know their information is safe and secure, and will above all not be shared.

8. Call to action buttons

Don’t come on too strong but maintain a firm understanding of what it is that they can expect from you. If they are submitting their details to get more info don’t use “buy now” or “order now”. Try using “Get more info” or “Request a Quote”. Make sure the button is big, bold, and colourful, it must look like a clickable button.

9. Social Sharing

Include social sharing buttons and a forwarding email option. People like to share cool stuff!

10. Emphasise the Benefits

State the benefits in a short paragraph and highlight the value of your offer. Combine this with an incentive to complete the form. (Like a free PDF download, or voucher)

Have a look at some of our own landing pages below:

• Explainer Videos
• eCommerce Development

Feel free to add any additional ideas you have in the comments below! To get Refresh to design you an optimised and conversion friendly landing page, contact us here.

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Pure Native Apps

Pure native apps, are mobile apps that have been coded in the native language of the platform. (eg. Android is coded in Java; iOS is coded in Objective C & C++) The advantages of a native app are that you have the full access to the native programming language of the mobile platform that you are targeting. This is essential for complex gaming apps, and apps requiring full native access to the phone or device features such as the camera, fingerprint sensor, dialer, or phonebook

Pure native apps are generally more expensive, more time consuming to develop, but are worthwhile in the long term for complex tasks.

Pure native apps may however not be completely necessary for simpler content driven apps, such as a news app or e-commerce app. In this case a Hybrid web-wrapper allows you to rapidly develop for all the mobile platforms using a single code-base.

Hybrid Native Apps

These apps are initially coded in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript which speeds up development, and they are then “wrapped” in a native app for deployment on your chosen mobile platforms. The obvious advantage is a single code-base to maintain, massively reducing maintenance costs and initial development costs for the app, while still providing an excellent user experience within the app for your customer.

Development using Cordova or similar Hybrid Native frameworks also means that your development team do not need to learn multiple development stacks (eg. Java, Objective C, C++) in order to create the apps. Simply having experience with HTML5 and the web wrapper will suffice to create content based apps across multiple platforms at a greatly reduced cost, and time-frame.

Mobile Web App

The mobile web is the most cost effective solution for a mobile app. Although this is merely a mobile friendly (Usually responsively designed) website – using HTML5’s touch gestures your mobile web app can function very similar to an actual app, with greatly reduced maintenance and with no user app updates required, vastly reducing the development and maintenance costs. The app could be upgraded to a hybrid native app down the line if budget allows, if coded with this in mind from the outset.

View more information about our mobile app development here.

Please contact us for more information and a proposal about our mobile app design and development services.

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Magento Commerce

Magento Commerce is a feature-rich open source e-commerce platform, supported by thousands of developers. Magento is regarded as one the best ecommerce platforms for stores with large product catalogues and high order volume.

Benefits of Magento:

• Themes: Fully customisable to your corporate identity with thousands of themes select and customise
• Extensions: A large number of extensions to extend your store with additional features
• Payment gateways: The option to use almost any payment gateway
• Scalable: Magento Community Edition can handle over 100 thousand products, and can be expanded to millions using the Magento Professional Edition. There is also no limit to extending the store to your needs as your business grows
• Trusted: Magento has been around for over 10 years, and is a trusted platform used by top ecommerce companies
• Secure: Magento has extremely good security.
• Advanced selling tools: Tiered pricing, bundled products, coupons, wish lists, product comparisons, and other selling tools are available.
• Full featured dashboard: Includes advanced order management, marketing tools, CRM system.
• Multi-store environment: Run multiple stores from a single Magento installation with different domains and themes.
• No Fees: No monthly fees other than hosting and SSL certificate

View more on the Magento Commerce platform here.

WordPress WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce system built as a plugin on the WordPress system. WooCommerce is a full featured plugin with many of the features of Magento for lower volume stores.

Benefits of WooCommerce:

• Themes: Fully customisable to your corporate identity with thousands of themes select and customise
• Plugins: Plugin are available for selling tools, payment gateways, wish lists, and other add-ons
• Highly customisable: WordPress is one of the easier systems to customise, which results in a quicker to market solution
• No Fees: No monthly fees other than hosting and SSL certificate

View more on the WooCommerce eCommerce Platform here.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce solution, which means the store is hosted on Shopify’s server but you have access to add features, have your own domain, and customise your website to your needs based on a theme or a completely custom designed store.

Benefits of Shopify:

• Themes: Fully customisable to your corporate identity with thousands of themes select and customise
• Features: Thousands of add-on features, and many payments gateways to use on your online store
• Automatic updates: Updates to the system happen automatically, and no updates need to be installed from the client side
• Full featured Dashboard: Advanced dashboard features for managing orders, products and customers.
• Quick to setup: Quicker and more cost effective to setup and customise your store
• Secure hosting: Shopify comes pre-installed with an SSL certificate, and a secure hosting environment

View more on the Shopify Ecommerce platform here.

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The AMP Project

The current issue with the mobile web (and the web in general) is that bloated website pages, filled with slow loading third-party ads and unnecessary JavaScript code, is slowing down the browsing experience and (especially in South Africa where mobile data is expensive) leading to frustration when viewing content on your mobile phone.

The AMP project (Accelerated Mobile Pages) aims to start creating a solution to this problem, by creating a framework for rendering pages that load super fast on your smartphone, and provide a better reading experience by using less resource heavy code, and ad delivery that is more streamlined.

The other major feature of AMP is that it uses a shared JavaScript library and no author written JS is allowed, which speeds up the page as multiple JS libraries or third party libraries cannot contribute to the page speed.

The project is an open-source project with a prototype on GitHub, led by Google. There is concern that they will then be controlling the code of this project, but they are actively encouraging collaboration through their GitHub repository, and it seems to me that their interests are true to the eventual goal of creating a framework for a faster more usable mobile web.

The goal of the project is to improve the mobile web experience, which hopefully then results in a more sustainable ad supported content ecosystem.

There seems to be a great uptake thus far from publishers on the project with the BBC, BuzzFeed, The Economist, The Guardian, and many others currently using AMP HTML. Technology companies such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and WordPress.com have also started using the AMP framework.

View more on the AMP Project here.

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We’ve selected some of favourite payment gateways below, and have outlined the features of each in order to make your decision a little easier. Some of the payment gateways will require setting up a merchant account with your bank, and others do not.

Paygate

Requires a merchant account: Yes
Website: www.paygate.co.za
Contact number: 0861 102 172

Paygate has been in business since 1996, and provides various payment gateway options for Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and Diners Club. PayGate has a number of options including Payweb which easily adds payment functionality to your website via a transferal to their payment page, PayXML which allows more integration options so you can host the payment page on your own website, and Paybill which allows customers to offer the functionality to pay any bill online. Contact PayGate to get their latest pricing options.

MyGate

Requires a merchant account: Yes
Website: www.mygate.co.za
Contact number: 021 555 3260

MyGate is a well-respected online payment gateway provider, servicing many top merchants such as DSTV, Naspers, HomeChoice, Mr. Delivery and Web Tickets. MyGate offer 3 main pricing tiers which have varying monthly costs, and transaction fees which can be chosen based on the number of transactions through your store . (View the Mygate pricing options)

MyGate also includes recurring payment options, and mail order or call centre payments, which turns your PC into a point of sale system. MyGate’s Tokenisation system is a great feature which turns card-holder details into a dynamically generated “token” which can be re-used for subsequent purchases. MyGate also features a mobile friendly payment page which allows you to take advantage of the increase in “mobile commerce”.

Virtual Card Services

Requires a merchant account: Yes
Website: website.vcs.co.za
Contact number: 082 561 7525

Established in 1996, Virtual Card Services (VCS) was one of the first payment gateways in South Africa. At the time of this article VCS charges R 285.00 setup, R0.57 per transaction for authorisation, and R0.57 + 0.5% of the transaction for settlements. (Maximum charge of R 4.56) The monthly fee is R 165.30, and bulk discounts are available based on the number of transactions. (See the VCS pricing structure here)

VCS offers a number of related products such as virtual terminal for processing transactions in bulk, retrying declined transactions, and giving refunds to name a few. Their Virtual EFT service, allows merchants to create single or recurring credits/debits and presenting these to the Automated Clearing Bereau (ACB) for processing.

Setcom

Requires a merchant account: Yes
Website: www.setcom.co.za
Contact number: 011 555 1110

Setcom offers two simple pricing options, one for credit card processing only and another option including SID Instant EFT. A fraud screening options is also available at R220.00 per month, with a R1,499 setup fee. (Latest pricing for Setcom is available here) Setcom also pays credit card transactions directly into your bank account, so you do not have to wait for the money to clear.

PayPal

Requires a merchant account: No
Website: www.paypal.com/za

PayPal is one of the leading global payment services, and offered merchant services to South Africa from 2010 onwards. No setup fee is charged, and pricing ranges between 2.4% to 3.9% + US$0.30 per transaction. PayPal has partnered with FNB to easily allow withdrawing or payments using their bank accounts, and also for non-FNB customers via the FNB Withdraw service.

The options available for online payments via PayPal include the PayPal express checkout for PayPal customers, and the PayPal standard checkout which authorises payments and return the user their your website.

PayU

Requires a merchant account: Not for PayU Easy. (PayU Plus, and PayU Enterprise require one)
Website: www.payu.co.za
Contact number: 086 111 72 98

PayU is one of the largest payment providers worldwide, and offers a variety of options for business and the largest number of payment methods of any gateway in South Africa. PayU is also available in 16 countries, and has a robust enterprise ready system for transaction queues for businesses requiring a large number of transactions at a time. The PayU Wallet allows consumers to pay from their wallet and not need to type in credit card details on checkout.

SnapScan

Requires a merchant account: No
Website: www.snapscan.com

SnapScan currently empowers over 17,000 merchants via their handy payment app, and have now launched a method of paying via the app for online purchases. Merchants sign up for an account, and customers then use the app and scan a QR-code unique to the order to facilitate payment. With no need to enter credit card details the process is simplified and more secure.

SnapScan charges a simple fee of only 3% per transaction with no monthly fees. (See the SnapScan pricing here) View our article on the SnapScan online payment facility here.

SID (By Setcom)

Requires a merchant account: No
Website: www.setcom.co.za
Contact number: 011 555 1110

SID is a Setcom product that provides an instant EFT payment service, that allows a customer to make a payment directly to the merchant using a version of their online banking service, with deposits made in real time. With the amounts pre-populated on their bank’s payment screen, the customers merely has to confirm the order and it will be fulfilled immediately.

Subscription charges are between R250 to R500 per month, and a minimum of 1.5% per transaction, which falls away for higher transaction volumes. (Latest pricing for SID is available here)

PayFast

Requires a merchant account: No
Website: www.payfast.co.za
Contact number: 0861 729 327

PayFast have simplified the pricing by offering no setup fees or monthly fees, and only 2.0% per transaction + R2.00 for debit or credit cards. (See full pricing here) PayFast also offer a InstantEFT option using a code which they then “scrape” on their bank account, and almost immediately process the transaction. This offers a much easier InstantEFT facility at 2.0% (minimum R2.00) per transaction.

PayFast also offers bitcoin, payD, Ukask, and mobicred payments, and they power some of the leading online merchants in South Africa including Takealot, Sportsmand Warehouse, and Legendary Brands.

Please get in contact with us should you not see your favourite payment gateway above!

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Accept SnapScan via your ecommerce store

How it works

Once you have added SnapScan as an option on your ecommerce store,  (They currently have plugins for Magento & WooComerce) your customers select SnapScan as a payment option, scan the unique QR-Code for their order, add in their SnapScan PIN, and voila you have been paid and no credit card details needed to be entered!

SnapScan also handles 3D Secure so your customers will be free from any pesky frausters.

Scan the QR-Code to make payment

Get it now!

SnapScan currently has plugins for Magento Commerce and WooCommerce, so contact Refresh now to get your website SnapScan enabled.

You can also Download their product PDF for more information.

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