Kalahari.com

» see kalahari.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Amazon is a river. Kalahari is a desert. Both companies reached for the largest natural feature on their continent and then pointed it at a book catalog, which tells you exactly how big the ambition was in 1998 and exactly how little anyone knew about what they were building.

Naspers launched kalahari.net in 1998, at the top of the bubble, with the stated aim of being Africa's Amazon. The first attempt is worth keeping because of how badly it went. The site was built and launched inside a month by three business people and about ten IT graduates fresh out of university, none of whom had shipped e-commerce before, with no business case underneath it. What came out was slow to load and awkward to use and it did not sell much of anything.

The rescue arrived in March 1999 in the form of Susan van der Schijff, who had been running the book club division at Via Afrika and understood direct marketing to South African households, which turned out to be the actual problem. The relaunched shop sold books, then music, then everything from flowers to electronics, and by the middle of the 2000s it was the default place an ordinary South African bought something on the internet.

Turkey opened its own version of this in the same year. Hepsiburada started in 1998 and is still trading in 2026, so the pattern is not that these things die. I was fourteen and on a 33.6k line and buying nothing online, and Kalahari never crossed my screen in any of the twenty-eight years since. That is the ordinary distance: national e-commerce is the least exportable product category there is, because the whole value of it is a warehouse near you.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

It changed address from kalahari.net to kalahari.com in 2011 and picked up a new logo in 2014, both signs of a business being taken seriously by its owner. In February 2014 Naspers closed its other South African e-commerce properties and folded what was left of them into Kalahari, which made it the single retail bet of one of the largest media companies in the southern hemisphere.

By December 2014 it was measuring 2,277,636 visitors a month and was the biggest e-commerce site in the country. The problem sitting next to that number was Takealot, which had come out of a 2011 relaunch of Take2 under Kim Reid and was measuring about 1.7 million in the same month while growing faster. Naspers had a stake in that one too.

~ the postmortem ~

The merger was announced in October 2014, cleared by the Competition Commission in January 2015 and structured the following month, with Naspers taking 46.5 percent of Takealot for R1.2 billion. Tiger Global and Naspers ended up holding roughly 41 percent each. The approval came with a cap of two hundred jobs that could be cut. Kim Reid stayed on as co-chief executive of the combined company, and no version of the plan kept two storefronts alive.

Customers were told in April that the site had about a month left. Selected accounts were moved across automatically, pre-orders placed before 31 May were still to be filled under the old name, and on the night of Thursday 30 April 2015 kalahari.com went off. It still resolves in 2026 and it still 301s to takealot.com, which is the tidiest ending in this whole category. Nobody let the name lapse and nobody sold it to a squatter. The company that won simply kept the door and left it pointing at itself.

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