#OnlineShopping: Here’s how the people of #Gauteng spend their cash online

E-commerce is now becoming one of the fastest developing branches of the economy and in 2017, 58 per cent of South African Internet users are now shopping online.

The picodi.com SA company spent some time studying trends to get a feel for the online shopping habits of people from Gauteng.

The study, conducted by Picodi, was aimed at understanding the shopping habits of South Africans, generally, and looked at data from each province, including Gauteng.

“Picodi.com operates in South Africa and has done so for many years. Being an Internet company, we work with data – big data,” explained Nikolay Kashcheev, who works in the Marketing and Analysis Division of picodi.com SA.

“Every time someone from South Africa makes a purchase using voucher codes from picodi.com – the new entry is saved in the database with the following information: date, time, the URL address of the shop, category of ordered item, the amount of orders in ZAR, the amount of saved money and the IP address of the user.

“So after a couple of years operating in SA, I wondered how shopping habits look in the country and whether they differ among provinces.”

The research studied an estimated half a million transactions and took about four weeks to extract and process. Gauteng is the fourth biggest province in terms of online purchases behind the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

“The results of the research were fascinating. Gauteng Internet users prefer mobile devices to traditional desktops, with 57 per cent of all recorded transactions in the city being made from a smartphone and over 37 per cent made from PCs. Shopping from tablets occurred only six per cent of the time. On average, people in Gauteng spent R469 on an order, while the average for South Africa as a whole was R477,” said Kashcheev.

“For me, it was very surprising, that South Africans barely use PCs on weekends,” said Kashcheev “Another interesting thing is that the majority of South Africans use PCs for online shopping during working hours (the peak hours are from 8am to 3pm). It seems like the percentage of people who have PCs at home are not that big, compared with other countries, where we conducted similar studies.”

The study also found that a third of online shopping is done during November, perhaps because of Black Friday specials, while rates of online shopping are particularly low during the first half of the year.

Kashcheev concluded that information such as this is useful to retailers in order to understand what customers want and this sort of information will hopefully mean that companies offer promotions in line with customers’ needs.

For more details on the research, click here.