New owner confirmed for PCMall.co.za

by Stuart Wilson, Tuesday 13 July 2010

South African e-tailer PCMall.co.za has confirmed that it has a new owner

South African e-tailer PCMall.co.za has confirmed that it has a new owner. PCMall.co.za, which has emerged as a significant online IT sales channel in recent years, had previously been a division of Titan5 Holdings. The e-tailer has confirmed a definitive agreement for the sale of its assets to individual buyer Jerome McClement.

“It has been tremendously rewarding having the PCMall.co.za brand associated with us for the last six years but it is now time for us to refocus on new opportunities with the Titan5 Holdings group,” said Ryan Kahan who has led Titan5 for the last decade.

The deal to offload PCMall.co.za’s assets has been bubbling away for some time now. Titan5 appointed McClement as managing director of the e-tailer division in November 2009 and the sale was actually completed in January 2010. The formal announcement of the sale is happening now – six months after the agreement – due to a ‘number of new developments within PCMall.co.za that had to be ironed out. A new website, with advanced searching technology has been written and implemented during the last 6 months.

“Hours of testing, along with the help of a vast amount of consumer feedback has allowed us to build a site that will appeal to a broad spectrum of internet users,” said McClement, at PCMall.co.za’s new offices in Rosebank, Johannesburg.

Potential buyers can now choose notebooks by colour, brand and screen size; or from a more technical aspect such as hard drive size, memory or even processor type.”

“It took a lot of brainstorming to figure out how to display our product range in a way that either an 81 year old grandmother or a 16 year old tech savvy user can associate with,” said McClement. “Meeting the requirements of a customer that chooses a notebook because it is pink as opposed to one of our corporate clients who focuses on speed to get the job done, has been interesting to say the least.”

“But we have managed to solve the problem by listing a number of different filters for each product range. The shopper can then choose how they would like to view each item and gradually filter them down until they are left with a handful of choices which would meet their needs,” McClement added.