Vodacom, Vaimo team up for new youth-based ecommerce platform

African mobile operating giant Vodacom teamed up with ecommerce Vaimo to deliver Vodacom 4U’s new online platform with a focus on the youth market.

Vaimo claims to be South Africa’s only Magento gold partner and helps people set up shop on the platform, which is one of the fastest growing in the world. It also claims to have helped more than 300 store owners to move their online business forward “without compromise”.

According to Vodacom, the ecommerce store is designed to appeal to the informed tech-savvy youth of today and will allow people to choose a phone and contract pairing as well as complete the application process, order confirmation and payment online.

According to Jarryd Chatz, executive head of sales and marketing: product and ecommerce at Vodacom 4U, the decision to with Vaimo was fairly easy one.

“Vaimo were by far the most specialised in the field of ecommerce. We went through a grueling task of trying to find the best company to take Vodacom 4U to the top of the food chain in eCommerce. Nobody came close to the solution that Vaimo offered us,” he says.

Vaimo MD Kevin Clarke meanwhile reckons that its multi-channel experience was key to it getting the Vodacom 4U job. “For us, multi-channel is about customers and their lifecycle across every touch-point. It is all about giving the customer the ability to buy anything, anywhere, in a way they want and giving them a consistent experience with all the touch points in which they interact with Vodacom4U.”

Vodacom 4U’s new online presence will reportedly integrate with four sales and supplier channels, with a strong focus on social media integration.

“Most of what we offer is so dependent on technology that we have had to come up with a more technological way to sell to our growing tech savvy customer base. Our bricks and mortar stores are great but we needed to position Vodacom 4U for the online revolution happening in South Africa. For years our customers have been engaging online with us, but it was mostly limited to customer service. The Magento platform enabled us to evolve our service offering to online contract applications and selling devices online,” says Chatz.

The new site will go live the first quarter of 2013.