Enterprise8.05.2024

Amazon South Africa’s same-day shipping tested

MyBroadband tested Amazon South Africa on launch day and we were pleasantly surprised with the shopping experience and same-day shipping.

Amazon launched its South African marketplace on Tuesday, 7 May 2024, after officially confirming its plans to do so in October last year.

The global e-commerce giant’s entry into South Africa had been the e-commerce industry’s worst-kept secret.

MyBroadband first reported that Amazon was looking for warehouse space in South Africa in January 2022.

That June, Business Insider reported that it had seen leaked documents confirming that the e-commerce and cloud computing giant planned to launch third-party marketplaces in South Africa and Nigeria.

Codenamed “Project Fela”, Amazon had planned to launch in South Africa by February and in Nigeria by April 2023.

Amazon’s Prime membership programme would also reportedly be available in South Africa shortly after launch. This has yet to materialise.

Project Fela was postponed, and the entire Nigerian launch eventually paused when the U.S. tech sector stalled in 2023.

Mass lay-offs at Amazon called into question whether the South African marketplace would go ahead at all.

However, sources close to Amazon’s South African operations told us the company still planned to launch. Amazon finally confirmed that it would launch a local marketplace in October 2023.

While perusing the site on launch day, we noticed that Amazon was selling products itself, much like Takealot.

It was unclear from its October announcement whether it would also sell products or focus purely on enabling third-party sellers on its platform.

To test its same-day delivery service, we selected a pair of Amplify earphones from thousands of tech products and verified that they were sold and shipped by Amazon.co.za.

Logging in with an existing Amazon account worked perfectly and allowed us to use previously saved delivery addresses and payment methods.

Amazon.co.za currently offers free delivery for items over R500 and a special offer for free delivery on your first order. This is only available for orders that are “Fulfilled by Amazon”.

Amazon claims its standard delivery is next-day on most of the items.

As our earphones were only R299, we didn’t qualify for the standard free shipping, which would normally cost R70.

Same-day delivery was available for R95.00.

Amazon offers a variety of logistics options for sellers to choose from, including Fulfilment by Amazon, Amazon Easy Ship, and Self Ship.

Fulfilment by Amazon means that Amazon will store, pack, and deliver sellers’ products on their behalf.

This is similar to Takealot’s offering through Mr D and comes at the greatest cost to merchants.

Amazon Easy Ship lets sellers store and pack their products, with Amazon handling delivery.

With Self Ship, sellers can handle their own warehousing, packing, and delivery, if they prefer.

Sellers may choose any combination of the above delivery options for their various products.

It will be interesting to see if offering Easy Ship and Self Ship will negatively impact Amazon’s reputation in the market or if its controls will be sufficient to ensure merchants provide good customer service.

For our same-day order test, we confirmed our purchase just after 08:00 on Tuesday and got a notification that the earphones would be delivered by 19:00.

The order was almost immediately assigned a The Courier Guy tracking number. It was collected from the Amazon warehouse around midday.

We received the earphones at 15:53, packaged nicely in an Amazon.co.za branded box.

If Amazon.co.za can compete with pricing against stores like Takealot, having a solid logistics partner like The Courier Guy that can offer consistent same-day shipping will make it a winner in the local market.

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