Our first success story for the year comes from Iconix Direct, a general all-round goods supplier based out of Cape Town. Jenny Zhao and her team haven’t been around for long, but they’re already being kept very busy with all the great things that come with having a successful online business.
Jenny was a supplier for Groupon but since it wound down its operations in South Africa in November last year, she had to think on her feet to make sure this sudden change in supply chain didn’t put her own of business. So she turned to uAfrica and Shopify and everything started falling into place.
We caught up with Jenny to chat about how it’s all been going since she launched her store in November 2016, here’s what she had to say:
JMH: So we know that you’ve been with us since November last year, but what prompted you to start selling online using Shopify specifically?
JZ: Shopify seemed like the quickest and cheapest way to get our online shop going. I had a pretty standard, no frills website which cost a lot and didn’t even have eCommerce functionality before I turned to Shopify, so the move made a lot of sense as I was getting more for less.
JMH: How did you find the setup process then, did you struggle with anything?
JZ: I took a day to test it all out and make sure the admin was easy enough to navigate around, but I was left with a rather untidy looking storefront.. I then got in touch with Aubrey at your office to ask for his guidance while I setup the site, this took three days to customise my theme and get all the navigation and images uploaded. The most important thing that I needed to do was resize my image and upload the final files which was very easy at the end of the day. I’m still very impressed at just how easily I got a website set up, the Shopify platform looks really professional with minimal effort.
JMH: Looking at uAfrica’s Multichannel and Shipping solutions, how does your team make use of it and what do you find most convenient?
JZ: We use the Multichannel to push our products to bidorbuy and we fulfil all our orders using your Shipping interface. We particularly love how simple and fast it is to fulfil and then track orders along their journey, it saves us a lot of time, which is a huge plus as a busy business woman. As a point of reference, at the moment I have over 100 orders to fulfil from a different platform and it will take us 3-4 hours just to print out the waybills, so that proves that uAfrica’s Shipping is better.
JMH: It’s always nice to hear good feedback like this! Moving on to your plans, can you give us any hints as to what you have lined up for Iconix in the next 12 months?
JZ: That’s a secret!
JMH: No problem, I thought I’d try my luck on that one. Last question, out of 10, how would you rate your experience using uAfrica.com and why?
JZ: 10! It’s easy to fulfil orders, to track the status of delivery. It saves us A LOT of time, I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know that has an online store.
So there you have it folks, it’s not just us that’s biased towards our own platform. Go have a look-see what IconixDirect.co.za has to offer, there are quite a few bargains to be had.
If you’d like to feature as one of our monthly success stories, you can get in touch with Jenn by emailing your contact details and a link to your online store to marketing@uafrica.com.
