Spree expands into second year
GM Louna Lohann headed up Media24's first apparel e-commerce venture, the Sarie.com shop, two years ago. Its trial and proven success led to the birth of Spree.co.za. She believes that the site's combination of magazine-style content combined with expertly selected products and excellent service is what sets the online store apart in the e-commerce landscape, which is a very competitive space in South Africa. It exceeded its targets in the first year of trading. "From our first three months of trading to date, we have achieved 170% year-on-year growth in visits to the site and a 250% growth in sales," says Lohann.
"We've expanded our offering, launched new categories and increased the quantity of items available in our store. It launched with women's fashion and quickly expanded to include kids and babies, home décor and gifts. All of these categories posed their own unique challenges, but we managed to overcome them, while maintaining our excellent service delivery record."
The company has also grown its staff complement substantially during the first year and has added additional software developers, buyers, planners, content producers, logistic managers and call centre agents to the team.
"We are a customer-centric business and proud of the fact that we currently deliver 60% of all our orders within 24 hours and that we offer both free delivery and free 30-day returns.
According to a MasterCard Worldwide Online Shopping Survey in 2013, 12% of online shoppers in South Africa make purchases on their mobile devices, while stats released in the Effective Measures South African E-commerce Report 2014 reveals 23% of shoppers make purchases via mobile.
"This increase in mobile shopping behaviour means we will be actively optimising our mobile and tablet offering as a part of our growth plans to ensure we are well positioned to accommodate demand and provide a positive e-tail experience to those growing users on mobile," Lohann concludes.
For more information, go to www.spree.co.za.