Our success story for the month of August comes from the online fitness and lifestyle gurus of Defined Lifestyle. Craig and Marinda Retief have been operating their online store for just over a year now and they’re making a very big success of it. The reason? Not only are their products of a very high standard, but their entire mission is about helping their customers get the best from using their products advice. This approach is a winner when dealing online so we caught up with them for a quick chat about their online journey so far:
JH: How long have you had your Shopify store?
CR: We started setting up our store in March 2016 but the store only went live in May 2016. We wanted to make sure that everything was in place before we launched.
JH: What prompted you to start selling online using Shopify?
CR: We had been looking at different platforms with each ones’ features, ease of use and pricing. It all just looked so user-friendly with Shopify. Building our own website, adding custom features and getting the shipping done at the same time was exactly what we were looking for to expose our brand in a professional, easy to use experience. Shopify is a very customisable tool that allows you to automate and manage key aspects of an e-commerce store without wasting time on repetitive tasks.
JH: How did you find the setup process?
CR: Setup was fairly easy with the layout of the tools, sections and functions fairly self-explanatory. The flow on adding products and managing the site was intuitive and smooth. It took us a few weeks to get everything settled the way we wanted. This was time well spent as it allowed us to get to know the platform better.
JH: Do you use uAfrica’s shipping and/or multichannel? What do you use it for?
CR: Yes we do, we use Multichannel and uAfrica’s shipping app. What we love is that Multichannel distributes our products based on our business rules to our bidorbuy account without having to manage it separately. If our website sells out of a specific product, multichannel automatically removes the product from bidorbuy preventing oversell of out of stock items. When new stock is booked in to our website, Multichannel automatically relists the products for us on bidorbuy. All we have to manage is Shopify as our main platform for our products and Multichannel takes care of the rest, it’s automated and seamless. The shipping app also keeps our clients up to date with the status of their order as it moves between cities and countries.
JH: What do you find is the most convenient aspect of using uAfrica?
CR: Our main focus at Defined Lifestyle is that we get the orders shipped out to customers as quickly as possible. With the uAfrica system, we can control every aspect of our fulfilment process that enables us to provide the best possible service to our clients. We have received so many compliments as our customers do not expect the delivery within 1-2 business days.
JH: What is your business strategy for the next 12 months?
CR: Growth, growth and obviously more growth. As a fairly new business, we work hard to improve every aspect of what we do to ensure that we deliver the best possible product and service to our clients. As a faith driven company we pride ourselves in doing ethical business with our clients which in turn drives us to perform the best we can for our clients.
JH: Out of 10, how would you rate your experience using uAfrica.com and why?
CR: 9/10. We really enjoy working with uAfrica. They are always very helpful in finding a solution if there is a problem and they also understand what customer service is about.
If you’d like to find out more about Defined Lifestyle and buy their products, head over to their website.
