OneDayOnly Seeks To Provide The Best Deals Of Products For Only 24 Hours. It was 12 years ago when Maurits Vermeulen and Chris Oberhofer began talking about the concept of OneDayOnly. With no outside funding or partners, the duo began working on the business part-time while remaining at their day jobs, Vermeulen in corporate finance and Oberhofer in legal. Their first hurdle was trying to find external fulfilment people to help manage the processes of their site, which in its infancy offered only one deal on one product a day. They soon made the decision to bring staff in-house.
OneDayOnly holds the esteemed title of being South Africa’s original daily deals website. Its deals offer excellent discounts, limited supply and are on sale for one day only. The company partners with top brands and key suppliers to able to offer their products to over a million potential customers through its daily mailer, the website itself and social media marketing. Provided the quality and price is right, it will sell anything – and that’s exactly what makes it so appealing to both buyer and seller. Couple this with the urgency of the deal and it creates a winning formula for a high number of sales in a very short space of time. This website doesn’t run itself as the company employs about 200 highly varied human beings to sell things, buy things, process things, answer emails, repair things and work on its website.
It prides itself on an energetic and authentic business mentality, ensuring that if it gets the basics right and have fun along the way, everything else – including sales and customers – will fall into place. It gets its hands on everything from gadgets to groceries, slash their prices and then offer them to customers for one day only. Every night at 00:00 the company wipes the slate clean and features a whole new set of deals. Customers have 24 hours to take advantage. Once customers have chosen what they want, their order will be delivered to their door in 5-10 working days.
Instead of hiding the shipping costs in the price of the product, the company decided to be transparent and show it. This lets it cut its prices to the bare minimum and show customers the best possible savings. It also means customers don’t pay double for shipping if they order more than one item.
