Mobile News South Africa

Jump Shopping goes mobile

South African online shopping search engine Jump Shopping recently launched a mobile offering of its popular search engine Jump.co.za, believed to be a first for the SA mobile community.

Jump Shopping Mobile enables users who are not in front of their computers to search through more than 3 000 000 products from 100 online stores in South Africa. This service can be accessed by using any web-enabled mobile phone and entering m.jump.co.za into the mobile browser.

“It makes perfect sense to launch such a product, as there are more mobile phone users than PC users in South Africa. This is a great initiative that empowers the consumers of South Africa and give them the ability to look for comparative prices while shopping in the real world,” says Albert Bredenhann, MD of Jump Shopping.

Bredenhann says that SA has more than 28 million mobile phone users (out of about 38 million accounts) and recent research and media coverage shows that SA's mobile users are using their mobile phones for more than just local calls

  • BBC reports 20% of its international WAP traffic (web site visits from cellphones) originating from South Africa;
  • Opera Mini, a leading mobile browser, reports SA as one of its top five territories worldwide;
  • An international mobile advertising network claims over 60 million page views per month originating from SA;
  • According to World Wide Worx's Mobility 2006 research study, there is large and growing interest in accessing the Internet with cell phones by young adult market segments.

Says Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, “The trendsetters are creating a buzz around the many ways in which you can make your communications life more effective with a cellphone that has Internet access. The next step up will be shopping with the cellphone. Meanwhile, however, using the cellphone to assist in traditional shopping is a natural evolution.”

In January 2007, Jump Shopping sold 22% of its business to BidorBuy Inc in Delaware, US.

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