uAfrica’s ecommerce awards celebrates 10th year anniversary

South Africa’s largest ecommerce competition, The South African eCommerce Awards, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. Founder of the event, uAfrica (previously known as Jump Shopping) thinks this will be its biggest year yet.

The awards were designed to recognise ecommerce stores that capture the public eye, give the best service, and have the best website, among a couple of other things. According to uAfrica, the event has seen year on growth with the addition of more and more entries each year.

The South African eCommerce awards were introduced as part of uAfrica’s South African eCommerce Conference in 2013. Andy Higgins, Managing Director of uAfrica, touches on the event:

With it being the 10th year, we want to focus purely on the Awards by hosting an event dedicated to celebrating this achievement so we will be hosting a gala event evening on Wednesday, 16 September in Johannesburg where we will announce the winners and runners up in the various categories.

uAfrica has secured PayFast, DPD Laser, Shopify Plus, and Nedbank for this year’s event sponsors.

Read more: SA’s eCommerce Awards: the real story

Public voting for the event is now open with the chance of winning a R10 000 cash prize. Public votes determine the outcome of South Africa’s Favourite eCommerce Website, while the nine remaining categories will by judged by uAfrica.

The 2015 event has added four new categories to its lineup, which are Best eCommerce Mobile Site, eCommerce Achievement Award, Most Innovative Store Concept, and Best Female Entrepreneur Award. These new categories join the staple of South Africa’s Favourite eCommerce Website, Best eCommerce Store, Best Shopping Process, Best Customer Service, Best eCommerce Services Platform, and Best Small eCommerce Business.

It will be interesting to see who takes home the prize of South African’s Favourite eCommerce Website and Best eCommerce Store. Previous winners have included Takealot, Yuppiechef, and Bid or Buy in various categories. With last year’s launch of Raru – founded by ex-Take2 founders – as well as the Takealot and Kalahari merger, we may see some interesting results this year.

Read more: uAfrica announces top 30 websites in SA ahead of eCommerce Awards