My advice to e-commerce entrepreneurs is to learn by doing - just start, and learn along the way. Don't be too afraid about it being perfect. And as you start, anxiety will go down and you will actually start solving those problems as you go along. You'll get more comfortable and you'll build your confidence. There are also many guides to assist you every step of the way.

We present a simple turnkey online payment processing solution for businesses, individuals, and nonprofit organizations to accept payment from their customers via a variety of different channels, but all via digital channels.  So whether it be on your website or in an app, or through recurring billing, there's a number of different ways to pay these days. All of them are really digital payment mechanisms rather than necessarily on a website. 

One of the best mechanisms remains email marketing which allows for you to push content in a useful way to potential customers. Another hack is sending abandoned cart emails or offering vouchers.

There was a real sense of joy and exhilaration when the company began to show traction. As you go through evolution, you find good things at different stages, but I must say that I enjoy that part of the business quite a lot. You know, everyone's kind of equal, there's not really a hierarchy. You're all kind of solving the problems together. That's fun stuff.

There have been seismic shifts in the e-commerce sector since PayFast started. The primary evolution has been the trust that consumers have in paying for goods online. Recently, the COVID crisis has been a significant boost for e-commerce in general as people have been forced to shop online.

It's now about commerce in general any more - not necessarily about online retail. It's been quite interesting to see that as time moves on, it's becoming more a broader base, more digital payment than online retail.

I always had this in me, that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to start my own business. I was thinking about comparison shopping, there were a lot of different ideas - but all of them needed payments. In South Africa at the time, payment was just really underserved.

People are spending too much time on their digital devices. At the same time, the number of people online provides an opportunity to connect with each other at a scale that has never been possible before.

Online and offline business both require the same level of attention to a business system in place at the start. Pick your platform according to the type of business you're in: there are many platforms out there that will suit different types of businesses.

COVID has accelerated the adoption of online businesses. However, there is still a massive opportunity as the share of trading is still relatively small.