Chefs, tech and property take e-commerce prize

Jump Shopping has announced the winners of the 2010 South African E-Commerce Awards with Yuppiechef, Take2 and Private Property as the winners in the various categories.

This year Jump Shopping decided to revisit the judging process with the aim of increasing the esteem of the awards. This has resulted in a change to both the award categories and the judging process. The categories where changed to be more business focused and are: The Public Favourite E-Commerce Website, Best E-Commerce Shop, Best E-Commerce Services Website, Best Design, Standards & Ease of Use, and Best E-Commerce Shopping Process. Jump Shopping judged all the nominated websites through a process of ordering products and evaluations which involved strict criteria. The services websites and product based online shops were evaluated separately due to the different nature of the types of businesses and were therefore allocated separate awards.

Yuppiechef proved to be a market leader by winning 3 of the 5 categories, namely Best E-Commerce Shop, Best E-Commerce Shopping Process and Best Design, Standards and Ease of Use. Jaco Roux, Managing Director of Jump Shopping said ‚South African online shops can learn from Yuppiechef. Their website design and execution are immaculate and they take great pride in the presentation of their deliveries to an extent which we did not see from any of the other nominated stores.‚ Take2 took the honours of being crowned South African Public’s Favourite E-Commerce Website and Private Property the award for Best E-Commerce Services Website. This year Jump Shopping noticed a few interesting trends amongst the South African E-Commerce websites such as the embrace of social media. According to Jaco Roux ‚Some South African e-commerce websites are taking notice of the marketing opportunity that can be achieved through the use of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, SA Camera, Kulula and Yuppiechef leading the way with their innovative Social Media strategies and community building, on both Facebook and Twitter.‚ ‚Online shops also seem to be embracing the concept of customer reviews and ratings with a lot of the nominated stores having implemented some kind of a product rating or review system. Now it is just up to the customers to embrace it and make full use of it to derive any value from such systems.‚ Concerning to Jump Shopping was the fact that only 5 stores had mobile websites. With the increasing amount of smartphones available to the public one would think that online shops would be embracing this new market. Jump Shopping is South Africa’s leading price comparison website and started the E-Commerce Awards in 2006 as a bid to uplift e-commerce in South Africa. The awards have proven to be immensely successful as the public and the e-commerce companies have embraced them to be the most prestigious recognition for e-commerce websites in South Africa. For more information about the awards and a list of this year’s nominees and their respective evaluations go to http://www.jump.co.za/awards.