YUPPIECHEF.CO.ZA: Another Hetzner eCommerce success
Winner of the best Home and Garden store in the 2007 SA E-Commerce Awards as well as this year's Sunday Times Food Entrepreneur of the Year, Yuppiechef.co.za is definitely one of South Africa’s eCommerce success stories. Its online store sells a wide range of premium kitchen tools, delivered to the customer’s doorstep free of charge. With no physical store to visit, Yuppiechef's website is crucial to the success of their business.
The Hetzner Connection
Initially Yuppiechef hosted its site internationally. However, the speed differences, time zone barriers and long distance phone calls associated with international hosting companies led to a search for a local partner that could provide a more personalised service. “We’ve been Hetzner fans as a result of previous ventures. They have a great reputation, very few people have anything negative to say about them”, says Andrew Smith, Technical Director of yuppiechef.co.za. “We opted for Hetzner’s Managed Dedicated Server as both the hardware and software is taken care of by Hetzner, leaving us free to focus on making a great website and telling the world about it,” adds Smith.
Smith comments that despite common misconceptions, eCommerce is not about technology, it’s about effective marketing and providing excellent customer service. “The fanciest code with the slickest backend won’t generate a single sale if no one is aware of your site. Our team is made up of greater marketers and sales people and we focus on providing customers with great service like free delivery to their doorstep. We leave Hetzner to ensure that our Server is running optimally with our website always available to our market. We’ve never had a customer complain about slow access to our store and we’ve enjoyed great rankings with Google SA as a result of hosting locally.”
Over the past few years with Hetzner, we’ve experienced almost no downtime due to hardware or software issues. We sleep well at night knowing that we will arrive in the morning to a healthy online store! - Andrew Smith, Technical Director yuppiechef.co.za
