The Importance of a Functional Online Presence during a Global Pandemic

The Importance of a Functional Online Presence during a Global Pandemic

The Importance of a Functional Online Presence during a Global Pandemic

While brick and mortar retailers have felt the pinch, online shopping has boomed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing retailers had to innovate fast, and small businesses and entrepreneurs started popping up everywhere.

The Booming Stats:

  • Online shopping is growing fast in South Africa, with sales expected to reach R225 billion within five years.
  • According to FNB, the average eCommerce spend already increased by 30% in the first half of 2020 compared to the year prior.
  • OneDayOnly did a survey among almost 6,000 South Africans which showed that around 62% of online shoppers are in the 25 to 44 year age bracket.
  • Pathfind Media onboarded 47 clients in 2020*, compared to 20 the year before.

It is not only eCommerce websites springing up, but a lot of businesses are realising customers spend a lot more time online than pre-lockdown, so they got with the times and upgraded their online presence to capture more leads and not miss out on opportunities.

Pathfind Media also gained many website maintenance clients (i.e. they came to us with existing websites) due to dissatisfaction with poor or no after-sales service. That is why our ‘claim to fame’ is delivering maintained websites.

Case Studies (aka Pathfind Media Bragging Rights)

SZ Promotions

When COVID hit, Bernadine Neveling, the founder/owner of this corporate gifting company, wasted no time to innovate by deciding to add PPE and wellness products to their repertoire to boost their bottom line. We were there to help them make their online store a reality.

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Musiek Wêreld

From a DIY Wix site with zero SEO, (see Why a DIY Website is a Marketing Mishap) - we helped the oldest music store in Cape Town’s Northern Suburbs to launch their online shop with 600+ products.

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Art of Giving

‘Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.’

Art of Giving is a passion collaboration project, driven by the desire to help creatives and artists showcase and advertise their work (or sometimes more abstract services).

The tagline: ‘Something unique for someone unique’ underpins the type of gifts you will find on this site: from personalised stationery and songs, to drawing commissions.

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Sooperocket

Talk about a stalwart entrepreneur! Elmare Welgemoed designs and manufactures metal sculptures.

We were presented with the exciting challenge of helping her portray her unique female voice and talent in a predominantly male industry. So, we designed her a logo that epitomises female strength, and a custom coded, Webflow eCommerce site to show her steel (so to speak).

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Trees Online

Owned by Dirk Heyneman, a qualified and experienced horticulturist, it was time for a fresh leaf for this business website. We helped Dirk to take his website to the next level with responsive design and a brand-new WordPress website.

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Fairtree Invest

We are very proud to be associated with this leading investment management company. The scale of this project launched us into a different category altogether, along with the customised investment calculator we had to build and test to perfection.

This custom-coded website, built with Webflow and hosted on Amazon Web Servers also makes for a much slicker and blazing-fast website.

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Untapped possibilities: never a better time to be online

The above stats and case studies hopefully serve to inspire budding entrepreneurs and established businesses.

If you are already online, now would be a good time to take stock of the performance of your existing site with a proper website audit.

And if you need to get online, don’t wait another year, or even month: we are here to help pathfind your way through the process every step of the way!

3 Reasons to get a working website:

  1. Maximise your market - The internet is the marketplace of the 21st century – it is a global network. If you have an online address, you are exposed to a much wider range of buyers. Through the web, you can target people anywhere in South Africa, or the world!
  2. A nifty notification station - Businesses evolve. So when it comes to sharing new information about your products or promotions, a website is the best way to communicate. And a website dances beautifully with a social media presence, since it produces the content to share there.
  3. Websites won’t wear watches - A website gives clients anytime-anywhere access to obtain information about your business, buy your products, make appointments and more… all while you sleep - it can truly be your hardest working marketing agent.
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