Not surprisingly, service levels haven't increased much. Was a wakeup call to see how retailers in South Africa just have never bothered to gear themselves up for online shopping and timely delivery, especially the ones with the resources to do so.
I get very frustrated with this, every so often we see articles about how bad retail is doing in SA and at the moment, however these companies simply cannot identify and satisfy a very clear consumer need. It's as if they don't want to make money.
With the exception of Takealot and Clicks, all the other attempts at online/digital shopping was one big Fail over the past two months. From having to Whatsapp my order to Spar, email it to PnP, Woolies being nowhere, a plethora of apps not delivering in my area to the other ones taking 10 days to respond to queries and refunding money because they simply didn't deliver and so it goes on. Really wasn't cool nor helpful.
It's going to take a while for businesses to gear up to become logistically efficient. It's a mammoth task, some businesses are perfect for online delivery services while others for certain reasons are not.
I'm a small business owner, most of my products are low ticket items and for the most part need to be viewed first hand for the customer to decide.
Let's say for instance we could have 200 walk-in clients on a Saturday alone that come from surrounding suburbs and further afield. If you had to reverse those walk-in clients and extrapolate that out to 200 deliveries in a day, it's just not going to happen. The cost of the item and the sheer mammoth task of doing 200 deliveries in one day or two. On a good day we could do maybe 10 deliveries to our outlying suburbs and that is just one vehicle. It would mean having 10+ delivery vehicles running all day, the logistics of this would be a nightmare.
Our products are seasonal like fruit and vegetables, people want to see what they are buying.
We do offer delivery at a fee but it is usually for items that clients can't fit into their vehicle or too much to load themselves. Some elderly people from the vulnerable group have sought delivery for which we have helped out.
Online business can work for certain businesses but practically speaking there are others that won't.
While I understood the need to have things delivered during lockdown, but this so-called demand is possibly a flavour of the month story as people were sitting at home but at Level 3 we will see a return to more or less where we were before lockdown started.
That being said, I agree the trend is more towards online shopping.
From having a motherboard delivered from Takealot to picking your apples and pears at Food Lovers, two different animals.
Sign up with Google
the "But not as Black Friday levels" part of the headline was just meh unnecessary tbh
