Compared to countries such as Germany and America, we are rather ‘small’ on the e-commerce side.  Last year alone the e-commerce industry in Germany made 15.5 billion pound translating roughly to 158.72 billion rand (using the latest exchange rate).  Not a bad number I would say.

But all is not lost for our fair country, according to World Wide Worx the number of internet users has grown in 2009 to 5 million users taking the total of internet users to 10% of our population and according to Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, this number may even increase to 6 million by the end of 2010, and with the number of internet banking customers increasing it is just a matter of time before they realise that there is so many other things that they can do on the internet.

Though the stats looks good, I had an interesting conversation with a colleague on the internet as a whole, and what he said made sense and is food for thought.  He said that in South Africa the biggest problem is that people find it hard to part with their credit card details and those that do not have are too afraid to get one, though if you look at the LSM’s in SA the number of homes that have the ‘extra’ bit to spend is rather in the minority

So, when you look at the situation from both sides, it looks rather bleak for SA and the e-commerce market unless, we able to win their trust but how we will do that, we leave for another blog.