eCommerce MoneyAfrica Confex kicks off in Cape Town

Ventureburn recently attended the third annual eCommerce MoneyAfrica Confex in Cape Town, featuring a range of notable speakers.

Ventureburn editor Graham van der Made chaired the morning session, as well as a panel on the potential for ecommerce in the South African and larger African markets.

The morning session covered Uber and Airbnb’s global success, and various digital strategies that companies could incorporate to keep up with their customers.

Luke McKend, country director for Google SA, was the first speaker, covering the importance of mobile in e-commerce.

The eCommerce MoneyAfrica Confex aims to cover a wide-variety of issues and solutions facing e-commerce

“I’m doing all these different things with my phone, there are all these apps… If you think about how you transact with financial services, of the top ten sites in SA, four are banks. That just speaks to how comfortable South Africans have become with using their phones and being online.”

The growing mobile adoption is especially important for startups and aspiring entrepreneurs as its opens the doors for new opportunities.

James McCormick, principal analyst at Forrester, was also a panellist at the event, and explained how insight strategies such as digital intelligence could greatly help SMEs and corporates.

“[Digital intelligence] is nothing more than trying to understand our customers as they engage with us and then using that understanding to make better decisions to generate better experiences and to continually optimise on that.

“And to me, that’s part of the secret of the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Google and a number of… startups or what we call ‘insights-driven businesses’.”

When all the panellists had their say, the morning session closed with a panel discussion around the status of e-commerce in SA and what could be done when the disruption comes.

Keep an eye out on Ventureburn in the coming days for our article on the panel discussion.