Nearly two-thirds of businesses introduced more online payment methods in response to the pandemic, enabling more customers to pay via the methods they want.
This was according to research released this week, conducted by World Wide Worx on behalf of PayPal and FNB, titled SA SMEs' digital response to the pandemic and the role of cross-border transactions, which featured data and insights from some 400 local SMEs.
Arthur Goldstuck, the chief executive World Wide Worx, who led the research, said another 22 percent intended to introduce more methods.
The results showed that online shopping is well-entrenched with local consumers and that customers are comfortable with the payment options on offer.
The Covid-19 pandemic pushed South African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to trade online, extend the number of payment methods they offer and pursue international customers.
Mark Mwongela Ngungi, PayPal sales development director for Africa, said this spoke to the maturing of the sector and businesses' drive to provide their customers with the payment methods they preferred.
Four of five businesses (79 percent) surveyed said their customers were comfortable shopping online and making online payments. Accepting orders through online shopping carts has had an overall business impact on 71 percent of responding businesses, showing the power of automation that e-commerce platforms can provide.
The survey showed that 74 percent of businesses started automating their activities in response to the pandemic.
Goldstuck said this was known to increase customer service and decrease costs, which was why a further 17 percent were intending to make this shift.
Almost a third of the businesses surveyed have started targeting international customers since the pandemic started. Four in five (79 percent) of South African businesses did not sell their products internationally.
Ngungi said operating internationally could be challenging for small businesses, which lacked education on market opportunities outside South Africa’s borders, were not familiar with fulfilment methods and needed to become more comfortable with global payment methods.
Factors causing hardship flagged by the respondents include lower customer demand (46 percent), supplier constraints (38 percent) and delivery to customers (35 percent).
Goldstuck said connectivity, which was traditionally a problem internationally, was only mentioned by 4 percent of businesses.
Meanwhile, TheSALT industry survey found that South Africans were spending more time on social media than ever before and that this had a significant and direct impact on e-commerce.
The digital platform that uses in-depth lifestyle information to connect businesses and brands to the right influencers said in a recent Internet-use survey conducted by Sortlist, South Africa ranked 4th globally when it came to the amount of time people spend online per day, totalling a whopping ten hours and six minutes, and adding up to about 154 days a year.
The figure was said to be impressive, not in the least because current statistics indicate that just 64 percent of the population had Internet access to begin with.
Pieter Groenewald, the chief executive of Influencer Marketing Group, Nfinity, which owns theSALT and other channels, said they wanted to understand just what South Africans were getting up to online and ultimately what it means for businesses who sold or were thinking of selling, their services and products online.
A significant insight that came out of the investigation was that South Africans were spending more time on social media than ever before. The Sortlist survey corroborates this finding, with results showing that of the collective 154 days online, 54 of these were dedicated exclusively to social media.
On this insight, Groenewald said the internet was undergoing a global social revolution.
“Nearly all of the 4.8 billion internet users worldwide are also on social media, totalling some 4.5 billion people. That means 57 percent of the people in the world are using social media.”
He added that it was not simply a question of being social as these channels were increasingly important when it came to the rise of social commerce, which was a form of marketing that used social media as vehicles to promote and sell products and services online.
BUSINESS REPORT