Cape Trade Portal

The Western Cape’s official tourism, trade, and investment organisation. Wesgro’s mandate is:

To enable and encourage domestic and international direct investment in the Western Cape.
To increase exports of Western Cape goods and services by enhancing exporter capacity, demand, and market access.
To promote the Western Cape as a viable business and travel destination in both domestic and foreign markets.

Wesgro’s mission is:

Stimulating, facilitating, and expanding economic growth and opportunity through the promotion of trade, investment, and tourism as well as the development of a powerful regional economic brand.
Wesgro concentrates on the following in order to meet its strategic outcome goals:
Successful promotion of Cape Town and the Western Cape as tourist destinations to boost domestic and foreign visitor numbers.
Supporting trade and export promotion for qualified exporters, which will increase the possibility of job creation and increase the province’s export capacity.
Attracting both domestic and international direct investment to promote economic expansion and job creation
Creating a powerful regional economic brand that positions Cape Town and the Western Cape as a dynamic business destination.

Wesgro needed a trade portal that would feature the following functionality in order to carry out their mission:

Connect Western Cape exporters with global buyers, particularly B2B interactions.
Give the Western Cape export ecosystem a central entry point to a range of digital solutions, knowledge, and intelligence. This includes automating a few of the Wesgro Export Manager’s features, such as the virtual trade exhibition platform and mass database communication.
Database administration, interaction with and between buyers and exporters, as well as automated reporting.

This leading international export portal, developed for WESGRO, has the following purpose:

Link all Western Cape export and export-ready companies with international buyers
Facilitate an e-commerce transaction to give effect to online export orders
Enhance business to business (B2B) engagements through an online platform
Enhance the ability of international buyers to source product from the Western Cape through the Portal
Provide a variety of digital solutions to boost exports from the Western Cape
Automated reporting including number listed Western Cape exporters, type of Western Cape exporter, type and number of Western Cape exporters featured, number of international buyers, active engagements between exporters and buyers, number of trade deals executed.

The portal has several unique features including the ability of the Exporters to upload and manage their own information, update products, etc.

The site’s most powerful feature is its completely unique, custom-built search functionality. It has the ability not only to find products or find company profiles but can also consider their HS Codes, BEE Level and Company Size (amongst other factors). Furthermore, there are special filters built exclusively for wine, one of the Western Cape’s largest exports. These all integrate for an all-encompassing and accurate searching experience.

International buyers who are unable to find products and services from the 3000 currently being showcased on site by over 700 exporters, can post trade leads. We built custom functionality allowing leads to be directly emailed to companies in the relevant category. These leads form part of the site’s exclusive content, only available to Wesgro-verified companies who are also able to go through exporter training as well as access and download Wesgro marketing material for their own use.

The portal can be accessed here: https://capetradeportal.com/

This portal is the first of its kind in South Africa and leading from an international perspective. Some media articles relating to this portal are listed below: