This is our Story, the Imall SA story
South Africa has many online directories and a fast growing ecommerce landscape. The question is, which online business directory offers you an all in one ecommerce alternative? The answer is: only iMallSA.com. On iMallSA.com you can add your business information, including pictures, videos, address and contact details. The fun does not stop there. On iMallSA.com you can also add events and sell tickets to your events directly to buyers online. Yes, you can sell tickets. This is also a very useful thing to do if you are in charge of a service business. This means that you can sell appointments for your skills and expertise. We also allow your clients to give you feedback on your services. In this fast paced world where clients are so quick to change their minds about whether to buy from your business or not, you require constant feedback in order to improve. We are here to make reaching your clients not only in Gauteng and all of South Africa.
How did iMallSA.com come about?
My wife Noluthando had just recently moved to Midrand, Johannesburg from Pietermaritzburg where she had grew up. Thando loves buying from people around the neighbourhood – a move had meant that she will lose her local hair salon (Sesi Thembi), her car wash, her traditional attire tailor and many other service providers.
As a young husband I only realised this challenge when she exhausted the data on her phone while searching for hairdressers and tailors and of course, her increasing frustration. The problem she was having is that all the Google results were too many. This made it difficult to choose the right hair dresser. She needed to see what other women had to say about the businesses she was interested in visiting. Another problem was that the websites she visited where complicated and never went straight to the point about their service offerings, and when she thought she found a winner, she discovered that they were too far.
I suggested to her to visit some of the other online directory sites, but the problem she discovered there was that, they did not look good, they were difficult to search and navigate, and most businesses did not have pictures, contact details and business addresses as they had to pay the site owner more money in order to display more information. Simply put they did not provide enough information for her to make a purchasing decision.
iMallSA.com was built to answer these questions from my wife, where can I find the best hair salon in my area and make an appointment with my hair dresser online? On iMallSA.com users rate a business, providing other users with information on whether the service provider is good or not. Businesses listed on iMallSA.com are all required to have pictures, contact details and all important information showing their business offerings and since appearances are important to Noluthando she wanted everything on the platform to look good and be easy to use.
Once we answered the questions of how to find the best local businesses, we realised that we may need to buy their products online without visiting their brick and mortar shop. This led to the idea of each business not only being able to display their products online, but actually managing and selling their goods online. Since most people are not technology wizards, selling online had to be easy, adding a product on iMallSA.com had to be as easy as uploading a profile picture onto Facebook. We wanted to build a true internet mall experience.
Challenges we faced
The platform took two years in the making, from idea generation to testing to finally piloting on the 3rd of June this year. The major challenge when starting out on a business project like this, was finance and we spent a reasonable amount of time approaching various government funding agencies and venture capitalists in order to get the funds that we required. This was futile as nobody would fund our idea. This led us to the only option on the table, bootstrapping! This meant that, we would not drive the cars we wanted, live in the neighbourhood or house that we wanted and even afford television for some time – this was good, gave us more time to work on the business. The support we gave each other in this time, is testament to how good working with your spouse can be. Though we are an online business, we are still a ‘moms and pops' of some kind.
Where to from here?
We continue to forge ahead inspired by our mission to help every small business in South Africa to sell and be present online. We are currently in high level discussions with multiple courier companies in order to provide an efficient and cost effective shipment service to our user community. We at iMallSA.com are also thinking of our app that will be the next way to help South Africans reach the small businesses they so love.
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