Last week Standard Bank accounced their new eCommerce platform called SimplyBlu. As this announcement caught the attention of the eCommerce community we set off on a mission to find out more about it.

In this article, we review our pros and cons of the platform, the fee structure and give you some more links for further reading.

You can also watch our video review for a deep dive into SimplyBlu and whether we would recommend that you use it for your eCom website.

Here are the pros and cons of SimplyBlu:

PROS: 

• Pricing includes a lot of services (website platform, invoicing, payment gateway & hosting).
• Quick payouts! An order received before 10 pm will be paid into your Standard Bank account by 4 am the next day. 
• Low payment processing fees at just 2.6%.  
• Recurring payment functionality comes standard. 

CONS: 

• Only payment options are credit card or Masterpass (no option for EFT, Mobicred, Bitcoin, Scode, etc) 
• There are no integrations to SA eCom service providers 
• There isn’t a library of plugins or apps to give the site extra functionality. 
• No SSL security (this is a biggy!) 

So how much will you pay for SimplyBlu? 

Standard Bank charges a once-off set up fee of R500 + VAT then you’ll pay R575 + VAT each month plus a transaction processing fee of 2.6%. 

Watch the video below for a more detailed review of SimplyBlue. 

WATCH FOR FREE

 

Further reading: 

• To see an example of a site built using SimplyBlu, see Pimvillegin.com.
• Read more about SimplyBlu here. 
• For dev and SDK info on SimplyBlu click available here. 
• To contact SimplyBlu email: [email protected]

We’re sure that Standard Bank will continually improve the platform and we expect that many of the “cons” listed above will be addressed soon.