MUNICH, Germany, Sept. 19, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- hybris, an SAP company and the world's fastest-growing commerce platform provider, today announced that kalahari.com, South Africa's largest online retailer, has selected the hybris Commerce Suite to power its retail vision forward, strengthen its position as an innovative market leader, and fast-track market growth selling both digital and physical goods via its online stores and marketplaces.
A 2013 survey of online shopping habits by MasterCard Worldwide reveals online retail in South Africa is growing by more than 30 percent annually [1]. As Africa's leading online retailer of electronics, toys, appliances, games and books, Kalahari.com will leverage the hybris Commerce Suite to respond to growth opportunities and further extend its market share in the fast growing Southern African commerce market.
Providing a true omni-channel experience, the scalability of the hybris Commerce platform will enable kalahari.com to support its rapidly expanding online operations, which include consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and business-to-consumer (B2C) retail, and deliver a feature-rich experience to a growing number of mobile shoppers. This will include selling digital goods such as eBooks, via kalahari.com's own e-reader device the Gobii, and a large expansion of its online catalog of digital and physical goods. According to a recent survey published by kalahari.com, mobile shopping in South Africa is being fuelled by the uptake of tablet devices, with 70 percent of tablet owners now using their devices to shop online [2].
Owned by MIH Internet Holdings, a Naspers company that specializes in e-commerce platforms, kalahari.com realized its existing e-commerce system would not be able to scale to support its fast growing business strategy.
"All our retail businesses and especially kalahari.com are highly customer centric, hence a large part of our IT focus is on delivering core platforms that enable the business to deliver the best customer experiences. At large scale and across a continent, this becomes particularly challenging, but with hybris in place we have a foundation to build upon that will free up up our IT teams to focus on the more innovative edge of our customer offering going forward," explains Michael Needham CTO MIH E-Commerce Africa and Middle East.
Alongside delivering the capability to cope with rapidly increasing data and transaction volumes, the hybris Commerce Suite will enable kalahari.com to respond quickly to changing market or consumer demands while simultaneously reducing site management and development costs.
"With cloud and mobile technology a strong focus we needed a flexible core e-commerce framework at the heart of our many systems that make up our platform," continues Needham. "The online technology universe is evolving at such a rapid rate, we needed a platform with a solid architecture, and a strong set of tools that allow the business teams autonomy in controlling the site's offering without heavy involvement from IT."
Moritz Zimmerman, CTO of hybris commented: "Retailers like kalahari.com are racing to meet the increasing demands of modern consumers, who are looking to buy both digital and physical goods in one place, and the hybris Commerce suite will enable global merchants to meet these objectives by developing and deploying advanced commerce solutions more quickly and through more touchpoints than ever before. We are delighted that hybris will be a key driver in taking kalahari.com to its next growth plane."
About hybris, an SAP Company
hybris helps businesses around the globe sell more goods, services and digital content through every touchpoint, channel and device. hybris delivers OmniCommerce™: state-of-the-art master data management for commerce and unified commerce processes that give a business a single view of its customers, products and orders, and its customers a single view of the business. hybris' omni-channel software is built on a single platform, based on open standards, that is agile to support limitless innovation, efficient to drive the best TCO, and scalable and extensible to be the last commerce platform companies will ever need. Both principal industry analyst firms rank hybris as a "leader" and list its commerce platform among the top two or three in the market. The same software is available on-premise, on-demand and managed hosted, giving merchants of all sizes maximum flexibility. Over 500 companies have chosen hybris, including global B2B brands Avid, Checkpoint Software, W.W.Grainger, Thomson Reuters, 3M and Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt as well as consumer brands Waterstones, Starbucks, Bridgestone, Toys"R"Us UK, Levi's, Nikon, Galeries Lafayette, Nespresso and Lufthansa. hybris is the future of commerce™. For more information, visit www.hybris.com.
About kalahari.com
kalahari.com is the market leader in South African e-commerce. Established in 1998, kalahari.com is South Africa's largest online retailer of millions of books, eBooks, eReaders, music, toys, appliances, games, cameras and electronics. With the emergence of the marketplace, which connects buyers and sellers together on one platform, kalahari.com has become one of the biggest online retailers in Africa.
[1] MasterCard Worldwide press release 27 June 2013 http://newsroom.mastercard.com/press-releases/south-africans-highly-satisfied-with-online-shopping-mastercard-survey/
[2] Kalahari.com 2013 Mobile Shopping Survey http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/168/97712.html