Takealot box problem
South Africa’s biggest online retailer — Takealot — has developed an amusing reputation for its overuse of boxes.
However, the issue has raised some more serious questions about its packing efficiencies and environmental priorities.
Takealot often uses much larger boxes than necessary to ship small products or puts multiple small items in the same order in different boxes when one large box could do the job.
In the past few years, South Africans on various online platforms have complained about Takealot’s “overboxing” ailment.
Perhaps the most infamous case in recent years was a customer who had ordered 100 grinding discs on a special for R7 a piece and received each disc in an individual cardboard box with extra padding paper.
The retailer would have saved significantly on packaging costs had it used a few large boxes instead.
TikTok user Annie Brand posted a video complaining about receiving three packets of wet wipes and two baby creams in five medium and large boxes.
“What is your bill for boxes at the end of every month?” Brand asked Takealot.
X user Shayur Mohun recently also posted that he had received three sets of hangers, each in an individual box, while the entire order would have fitted in one of them.
A few years ago, a Reddit user posted an image showing how they received three rolls of gift wrapping paper in three large boxes, where one could have sufficed for all items.
Other users also provided detailed accounts of getting small items in large boxes in the comment section of the Reddit post.
One user said they received a pack of four rechargeable AA batteries in a box big enough for six 2-litre oil bottles.
Another said they had placed quite a large number of orders on the platform over a four-month period and were always astonished by the space wastage in Takealot’s boxes.
“I can imagine you wouldn’t want to overload the weight of a box, but they really need to train their packers,” he said.
However, a user named SeanBZA, who claimed he was previously a warehouse item picker, explained that training was not the problem.
He alleged that the reason behind the overboxing was that speed was the primary measurement of Takealot warehouse packers’ performance.
“If it takes 10 seconds longer to reach and get a smaller box, the packers will not do it because the only metric that is used to penalise them is time,” he said.
“Thus, they will shove it in the first box that fits [the product], and send it, even if it is in a massive box.”
SeanBZA also explained the possible reasons for shipping items in an order in different boxes instead of one.
“They were either shipped from different warehouses, or different parts of the same warehouse, or from different suppliers,” he explained.
“In each case, the order is picked, packed and labelled, then put in the line to go out, and the people who are loading simply scan each parcel, put it in the line for the appropriate truck or container, and carry on.”
Repacking for efficiency was not a priority because pickers also had limited time to complete an order.
“They get 30 seconds per item to do this, in a warehouse 300 metres long, where you can be picking stuff at one end to the other,” he said.
“I have done picking, and this is impossible to do. Even small warehousing is going to take five minutes or more, if you want to actually get it 99.9% correct at first checking. “
MyBroadband asked Takealot about why it often shipped small items in large boxes or used multiple boxes when only one was necessary. It did not respond to our query by the time of publication.
Takealot was already shipping an average of 35,000 orders per day in 2019.
If it is overusing boxes by a factor of 2:1, which would perhaps be a gracious assumption given some of the accounts above, it would have shipped double the boxes necessary.
While the once-off cost of one box might not seem like much, it could build up substantially over time with tens of thousands of orders per day, impacting Takealot’s bottom line.
That is something the retailer can barely afford, considering it only recently became profitable.
However, given SeanBZA’s explanation, it may well be that the time lost to better optimising packaging may carry a greater cost than the packaging itself.
Not a problem unique to Takealot
The big problem with this tactic is that it significantly increases Takealot’s environmental impact.
Sustainability in packaging management is not unique to Takealot but is a general issue in the e-commerce industry, with Amazon being the biggest player globally.
According to CNBC, the amount of cardboard boxes US e-commerce giant uses to ship items to customers every year is enough to cover a mile(1.6 km)-wide wide road from New York to Los Angeles three times over.
That would cover a total distance of about 12,000km as the crow flies, over 2,000km further than the distance between Cape Town and London.
In terms of total area, the boxes would have a footprint of about 19,200km2, enough to cover nearly the entire Kruger National Park.
Amazon has recently made some changes on this front by shipping more orders in their original manufacturer packaging, which is often already sufficient for protecting items against damage during transit.
The retailer identifies such products and contacts product vendors before making a decision to test the product durability.
To ship without Amazon’s extra cardboard box, the products need to survive drops off a conveyor belt, vibrations and shaking during vehicle transport, and accidental mishandling by the delivery driver.
South African e-commerce companies like Takealot would have another dimension to consider — rampant crime.
Couriers have been targeted for some of the high-value goods they often carry — including electronics like smartphones.
Not using cardboard boxes for high-value items would effectively be advertising them to robbers.
Loading ...