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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s own platform.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s idea, says Drennan, is not to compete with local online retailers, but to provide products that aren\u2019t easily available in the country.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now Amazon.com has given Wantitall access to its e-commerce platform. \u201cAs you search our site, it searches Amazon at the same time, and applies our pricing model.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n