Plugging the gap

Duncan McLeod

Duncan McLeod is the editor of Techcentral and a columnist for Financial Mail. Dun won various award over the last decade, including the Telkom...

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When high levels of theft and fraud forced US e-retailer Amazon.com to stop shipping high-value items to SA, three young SA Internet geeks spotted an opportunity to build an online business.

Brothers Justin and Ryan Drennan and their friend Terence Murphy quit their day jobs last year to launch Wantitall.co.za, a site that sells and delivers millions of products from Amazon and other US e-retailers. Since then, the three have developed an advanced e-commerce platform that integrates with Amazon.com’s own platform.

The system automatically converts the dollar prices of goods into SA currency, calculates the delivery costs and adds a mark-up. Goods are sent daily to a delivery point in the US from where they are despatched to SA using DHL.

Wantitall has already attracted the interest of investors, including Ronnie Apteker, founder of Internet Solutions. Apteker and another, unnamed investor have acquired a 30% stake in the start-up. Wantitall’s idea, says Drennan, is not to compete with local online retailers, but to provide products that aren’t easily available in the country.

This could include anything from cameras to sunglasses. There are more than 10m products listed on the site. It already ships more than 100kg of products a day to SA. Last October, when Amazon.com detected the growing number of orders Wantitall was placing, it invited the team to its Seattle, Washington, headquarters.

Now Amazon.com has given Wantitall access to its e-commerce platform. “As you search our site, it searches Amazon at the same time, and applies our pricing model.” Because Wantitall uses trustworthy courier services, it has not lost a single shipment through pilferage. The company plans to go international soon and is considering opportunities in South America and Eastern Europe.

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