About uAfrica – What We Do
What is uAfrica?
uAfrica takes the messiness out of running a successful online store. With quotes from various couriers, automated shipping labels and a multichannel feature that updates inventory and centralises order management. Logistics has never been easier!
What does uAfrica do?
uAfrica is an eCommerce tool built to streamline order fulfilment and shipping processes. It has two main features – Shipping and Multichannel, and its aim is to automate and smooth out order processes for online stores in South Africa, while saving merchants valuable time and money.
Shipping
Orders from the various sales channels can be fulfilled from the central dashboard. Merchants can specify their order’s dimensions and specifications and receive various real-time quotes from our three courier partners. After choosing a suitable quote and fulfilling the order, uAfrica does the rest! The system generates an automated shipping label, sends a collection request to the courier to pick up the parcel, enables automated tracking for the parcel, and sends an update to the customer. The only thing left to do is to print the shipping label, pack the parcel and wait for the courier.
Multichannel
The Multichannel solution gives merchants the ability to sell their goods across multiple platforms such as bidorbuy, Shopify, WooCommerce and PriceCheck. uAfrica has built integrations with these platforms, enabling the syncing of orders from the different platforms to uAfrica’s central dashboard. Merchants can manage and fulfil their orders from the dashboard, while inventory is updated and information is sent back to the specific platforms. uAfrica’s Multichannel also enables the pushing of products from the Primary sales channel to other secondary channels.
The Story of uAfrica
The story of uAfrica started back in 2004 as Jump Shopping, an online store (later turned Comparative Search Engine), founded by Jaco Roux. In 2012, Andy Higgins, founder and former Managing Director at bidorbuy.co.za, joined forces with the Jump Shopping team. They rebranded as uAfrica.com.
The new uAfrica team realised that there were no good cloud-based solutions in South Africa. At the time, Shopify was just starting out, but was, unfortunately, not available in South Africa.
The uAfrica team went ahead and developed a plugin for Shopify to enable PayFast to integrate into Shopify. Although it was not allowed at the time, the team got the go-ahead and paid for the integration. This allowed uAfrica to sign up customers in South Africa.
After building that customer base, the uAfrica team started developing the multichannel app which pulled everything together. The app offered multichannel solutions to allow customers to push products from one channel to another and to keep two channels in sync.
It was then that they realised that fulfilment and shipping was a problem. With courier systems being notoriously difficult to integrate with, especially for those running small to medium businesses, uAfrica decided to take the pain out of the process by developing a single, easy to use solution.
This lead to the development of uAfrica as we know it today. The rest is history.