BUSINESSES OF THE FUTURE

These entrepreneurs are breaking new ground and offering personalised customer service at a click of a button

- ZIZIPHO MQINGWANA

DONALD VALOYI, Founder and CEO of Zulzi

Zulzi is an on-demand delivery platform where busy people can order groceries from all major retailers and get them delivered to their doorstep within an hour. This business used to be an e-commerce platform, where we sold books and electronics to students. The idea matured when students started wanting to buy more things online and get them quicker. We worked on the platform introducing new categories such as food, groceries, liquor and pharmaceutical products and went live with the app. At first, we were doing the deliveries ourselves. We later realised that delivering food was complicated and there was also competition from Mr D and UberEats. That’s when we decided to concentrate on groceries.

It took a while to get the whole system working – getting the personal shoppers to stay on the platform and drivers to get to the shoppers on time. We continue to learn and look for ways to refine our platform to make it more useful to our customers. We don’t work in isolation. We compete with other platforms and this drives us to always innovate.

We started with no partnerships, but now we have companies that want to partner with us. Some brands even want to advertise on our app, which we find really appealing. We’ve also been trying very hard to penetrate the middle-income market, that means finding ways to making our products even more affordable. We offer specials subsidised by retailers.

FEZILE MOYANA,

Webmaster for the Department of Provincial Treasury