How a South African startup landed a multi-million contract with Shopify and built an e-commerce empire

uAfrica’s exclusive reseller agreement for Shopify in Africa was highly lucrative for the company, helping it grow into the significant e-commerce logistics player it is today.

The story of how it landed the deal is one for the business textbooks and a testament to South African resolve and perseverance.

uAfrica has a storied history dating back to 2004 when founder Jaco Roux launched a price comparison site called Jump Shopping.

Towards the end of 2005, online auction platform Bidorbuy bought a stake in Jump.

When the fates (read: Google) began to turn against price comparison websites, Jump Shopping needed to adapt quickly.

Bidorbuy founder Andy Higgins joined forces with Roux and the Jump team in 2012 to create uAfrica.

While uAfrica would eventually develop a logistics system that helps power several South African courier companies, back in 2012 it was still finding its place in the e-commerce world.

“One avenue being explored was to build our own software-as-a-service platform for online stores,” Higgins told MyBroadband.

“When doing research, we came across Shopify, which provided a platform very similar to what we envisaged except it was not very well established in South Africa with only a handful of local stores using it.”

Higgins said the biggest obstacle was that sellers could not accept local payments through Shopify.

Having identified the gap, uAfrica built the first local payment integration into Shopify using PayFast.

“This was the obvious choice due to my involvement in PayFast as a cofounder and director,” Higgins reflected.

“Incidentally, this turned out to be one of the best moves we made that assisted PayFast to grow during its earlier years.”

Having seen the benefit for PayFast, uAfrica invested in a Nigerian payments business now called E-settlement Limited, for which it also did a Shopify payment integration.

Higgins and Roux flew to Shopify’s headquarters in Ottawa, Canada and began courting the company in the hopes of establishing a deeper partnership.

“We noticed that the Shopify.co.za, Shopify.co.ke and Shopify.com.ng domains were being squatted on,” Higgins said.

“Fortunately, Shopify was not yet as well known as they are today, and we were able to convince those domain squatters to sell us the domains for a palatable amount.”

Higgins said these domains have since been handed over to Shopify, but before that, they had formed part of their proposal to the company.

He, Roux, and other members of the uAfrica team took multiple trips to Canada to try to convince Shopify to award them a reseller agreement.

Under the terms of the deal, uAfrica would run events promoting Shopify locally. Shopify would offer local pricing and special benefits for local merchants.

uAfrica’s strategy involved a stealth social media campaign in which they wooed various Shopify staff.

Higgins said they stopped short of doing a flash mob outside the CEO’s home, but considered it.

They also hired a freelancer in Ukraine to make a video asking Shopify to marry them:

Their persistence and creativity paid off. In 2014, Shopify awarded uAfrica an exclusive reseller agreement for Africa.

“There were only a handful of such partnerships that Shopify entered into worldwide,” Higgins explained.

“Where they did, they were with much larger companies, such as leading telecoms and mobile operators. So, we see this as quite an achievement for the still really small uAfrica at the time.”

The relationship lasted several years, and Higgins said uAfrica exceeded the targets Shopify had set for them.

“Shopify became one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms in South Africa,” he said.

Shopify would soon go public, with its stock launching on the New York Stock Exchange on 21 May 2015.

The IPO valued the company at about $1.27 billion. Today, its market cap is over $91 billion.

“Given the meteoric growth of Shopify, it is not surprising that their focus as a company shifted, and they ended up discontinuing their reseller programme,” Higgins said.

Shopify has also shifted more towards empowering enterprise customers, whereas uAfrica’s focus has always been on SMEs, he said.

Higgins said that Bob Group — which was formed by the merger of uAfrica and Bidorbuy — still enjoys a good working relationship with Shopify.

They have two successful apps in the Shopify app store — one for Bob Go and another for Bob Pay.