Business

The man who accidentally founded a South African eCommerce empire

Kirsten Minnaar • 25 November 2025

Ryan Bacher co-founded Netflorist, an eCommerce giant and the biggest flower delivery company in South Africa, by mistake.

Today, Netflorist is considered a household name in South Africa, despite the fact that Bacher and his co-founders started their floral eCommerce business right before the dot-com crash, with no knowledge of the flower industry.

After graduating with an LLB degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994, Bacher went to work for the Club Med group in the Caribbean.

When he returned to South Africa, he joined NetActive, a JSE-listed Internet company. In 1998, the Wooltru Group, which consisted of Woolworths and Truworths, bought a stake in the company.

They tasked NetActive to build an eCommerce website for one of their subsidiaries, Makro. eCommerce sites were still very new at the time, with Amazon only having been founded five years prior.

No one at NetActive knew anything about eCommerce, so they decided to start their own online shop, simply as a way to learn before building something for Makro.

“We were only doing that in order to win Makro’s account,” Bacher explained at a Gordon Institute of Business Science forum in 2016. “We didn’t really want to actually sell anything online. We were a services business.”

They looked at which eCommerce businesses were currently operating in the United States to see if there were any products they could sell for a month or two, and they stumbled upon a flower retailer.

“It was February, and Valentine’s Day was coming up in two weeks time. So we thought ‘great, we’ll build a site and put some roses on it’,” he said.

So, in February 1999, they launched Netflorist. Their plan was simply for a few of the founders to purchase some flowers for their wives and girlfriends to see whether the website worked.

An error-ridden website

Being an Internet company, they had around 30,000 email addresses, to which they sent emails to promote the launch of Netflorist.

Since this was still the early days of the internet, people were thrilled to receive these emails. Much to the founders’ surprise, several people bought flowers on their website for Valentine’s Day.

Unfortunately, since they were so inexperienced, the website had a number of problems. First, the homepage had no products at all.

“Imagine walking into a retail store and just getting hit with reams of data. That’s what the site was,” Bacher explained.

Since US-based eCommerce sites all seemed to feature a search box, they added one to their website as well. The issue was that, normally, a search box requires a database so it can look up products.

However, they didn’t have a database. They only had one product page with 12 items, and that was the page the search box always linked to. A customer could type any random word into the search box and land on the same page.

Online payments were another challenge. In 1999, online credit card processing barely existed. One company was still in beta testing, and they didn’t want to rely on something experimental.

So, they created our own “system”. After entering card details and clicking “Pay”, an egg timer was programmed to spin for eight seconds, and then a message appeared stating that the transaction was successful.

In reality, the form was simply saved, and every night they typed the card numbers manually into a Speedpoint machine.

A few days after the website launched, they got a call from Hein Pretorius, a senior in the Naspers group and the future founder of Kalahari.net.

He enquired which company they used for their eCommerce transactions. “No, it’s top secret. I can’t tell you,” Bacher fibbed. “I didn’t know what to say to him.”

Netflorist booms – by accident

Despite having little hope for their test site, customers continued to purchase products from Netflorist even after Valentine’s Day had passed.

“For the month of February, we did R30,000 worth of business. To put that into perspective, that was slightly more than an average florist in those days for the month. That was quite extraordinary for us, because we built this in four days,” Bacher said.

The fact that they were able to make as much revenue as a real florist, with almost no resources and no knowledge of the floral industry, made them realise that there was real potential in the eCommerce business.

In the end, they never built an eCommerce site for Makro, but they did decide to commit to their own, burgeoning Internet business.

Even though they had a severe lack of industry knowledge, there were several advantages to operating in the flower market.

The fact that people had been ordering flowers telephonically for years made it easier to get customers to buy the product online.

Unlike products like furniture or clothing, which customers often want to see and feel before making a purchase, flowers didn’t have the same issue.

At the time, there was also no dominant player in the floral industry in South Africa. This gave Netflorist the opportunity to learn more about the space and make mistakes along the way.

The business was started not long before the dot-com crash in 2000, as investors sold off technology stocks at significant rates. Bacher explained that, fortunately, Netflorist was well-positioned to survive the crash.

Unlike other Internet businesses, which had focused on selling virtual products or even simply growing their client base, Netflorist was selling a physical product and generating a revenue stream right from the beginning.

Many Internet companies had received an over-investment without considering how they would generate revenue, which meant that they went bust once the investment dried up.

Netflorist, however, didn’t have a large capital stream to start with, which meant that they had always been managing their cash flow well without stretching themselves too thin.

Becoming an eCommerce giant

The business made an important change in 2006, when it decided to move its supply chain in-house. Up until that point, they had outsourced floral and gift basket arrangements to businesses across the country.

However, they realised that the true value in eCommerce was not really about technology. Instead, it was about logistics.

For Netflorist, ensuring products were delivered on time was a non-negotiable requirement, as being late meant customers would miss gifts on important events, such as anniversaries or birthdays.

So, even though having their own warehouses was more expensive, it allowed them to ensure customers could trust their products would arrive on time.

Throughout the years, Netflorist also continued to expand its product offering. Today, it sells gifts ranging from home decor and snacks to clothing and beauty products.

More than 25 years after the business was founded, Bacher is still Netflorist’s managing director, although he currently resides in Australia, where he is looking for new opportunities for the group.