Mygate Aims To Bridge Gap Between Ecommerce Patronage And Internet Growth

August 28, 2014 Onyedimmakachukwu Business, Retail & Manufacturing, Strategies & Solutions, Telecommunication

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Despite generating much buzz, the E-commerce industry continues to struggle to attract a huge chunk of internet users in South Africa, a trend that payment gateway Mygate says it is out to change.
VENTURES AFRICA – Although the growth of South Africa’s e-commerce industry has been tremendous, the industry still fails to draw in much of the country’s booming internet community with fears over security and lack of adequate know-how the main banes.
Two researches depict E-commerce’s struggle to catch up with internet growth in South Africa. While MasterCard’s 2013 Online Shopping Behaviour Study show that there was a 9.5 percent growth in the number of online shoppers -from 2.1 million in 2012 to 2.3 million in
2013, Digital Media and Marketing Association posit that South African online population grew by 17% from 12 million to 14 million over the same period.
This slack is what South African Payment Gateway provider, MyGate, says it is out to tackle. The Cape Town-based company which serves merchants throughout Africa, such as DSTV, Naspers, and a host of others, says it has repositioned its business to focus on getting South Africa’s growing population of new, inexperienced Internet users to make their first purchase online and to increase the adoption of online and alternative forms of payment.
Mygate says it views the fact that the overall percentage of Internet users shopping online is not keeping up with the rate of growth in total users as both a challenge and an opportunity for them and their merchants.
Citing Mastercard’s 2013Online Shopping study , MD of MyGate, Dan Edmiston noted that security concerns are still a major inhibitor to e-commerce growth with 42% of Internet users surveyed saying that security was the main reason they did not shop online, up by 4% from last year.
“This is an area we will be addressing as we look at incorporating more visual cues into our payment environment that reassure first time shoppers that they are transacting in a secure PCI compliant environment, as well as raising awareness that credit cards are not the only methods of payments for online transactions”, he added.
Edmiston’s company, MyGate provide its merchants with payment products that enable them to offer their customers alternative methods of payment to online credit card payment, such as debit orders, alternative credit facilities, and payment via EFT.
Pointing to the Smartphone’s tremendous boost of the population of internet users, with approximately 92% of Internet users owning a smartphone and 80.2% using their smartphones to access the Internet, Edminton disclosed plans to make E-commerce more mobile friendly.
“We are also working on getting more users to make purchases via their smartphones, as well as increasing the frequency of online payments being made by more experienced users by offering added convenience through products such as 1Click payments, batch payments and mobile payments,” says.
“Our objective is to help accelerate the growth of e-commerce in South Africa by increasing the number of transactions being processed by MyGate merchants. With our new focus we are specifically working on ways to get inexperienced users to make their first online purchase and getting more experienced users to make more of their payments online,” he added.