Despite the economic downturn in South Africa, Takealot is expecting a massive increase in sales during Black Friday 2017.<\/p>\n
Takealot co-CEO Kim Reid said they expect five-times the amount of traffic compared to last year.<\/p>\n
They have been preparing to make sure they meet the expected demand, which included making their\u00a0IT systems more robust, employing and training more people in the logistics and support divisions, and putting backup payment processes in place.<\/p>\n
The new systems have already received a workout, with Takealot showing 70% year-on-year growth in September and October, said Reid.<\/p>\n
Takealot said it has deployed Kubernetes to help it scale quickly when it needs to – as will be the case on Black Friday.<\/p>\n
Kubernetes helps automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications, such as those built with tools like Docker.<\/p>\n
It is an open source system designed by Google, which was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.<\/p>\n
Takealot has also launched a new tracking mechanism to show shoppers where their parcel is at every step of the fulfilment process.<\/p>\n
\u201cTracking was somewhat erratic and not self-explanatory,\u201d said Reid. This resulted in calls from customers to ask where their parcel was.<\/p>\n
The new system will be more granular and users can see if there are delays in the order process.<\/p>\n
Another important aspect for Takealot is its logistics and support divisions.<\/p>\n
Reid said they have appointed more staff in warehouses, employed more drivers, and ramped up their contact centres.<\/p>\n
He said the new staff have been trained to ensure they are up to speed with Takealot’s processes.<\/p>\n
The appointments are a mixture of full-time and temporary positions, and Takealot’s growth will allow it to bring certain temporary workers into full-time positions in the future, said Reid.<\/p>\n
Reid added that Takealot has to constantly balance capital expenditure and hiring of permanent staff against the projected growth of the business, however, and over-investing or taking on too many staff may cause issues down the line.<\/p>\n
Credit card payments in South Africa buckled under the load of Black Friday sales traffic in 2016, and Takealot wants to ensure this does not affect sales in 2017.<\/p>\n
Shoppers were able to proceed to checkout when shopping online in 2016, but there were system failures when their banks had to verify transaction with 3D Secure.<\/p>\n
This is detrimental to a retailer and this part of the payment system is outside of their control.<\/p>\n
To add to a retailer’s frustration, a problem with payments spills over into other areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur call centre fell over as people called in to find out why their payments weren\u2019t going through,\u201d said Reid.<\/p>\n
It also causes problems with limited-stock deals, where shoppers try to pay for an item on special, only for payment to fail and the item then sells out.<\/p>\n
To ensure it does not run into issues in 2017, Reid said they have a fallback payment process.<\/p>\n
Takealot previously only used Bankserv to process card transactions. This year, it has added Bidvest as a second payment provider, in case 3D Secure at Bankserv falls over.<\/p>\n
Reid said part of getting ready for Black Friday involved testing Bidvest\u2019s systems – which they did on 10% of their transaction volumes.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the testing, Takealot identified an issue where certain cards were not being accepted, allowing the issue to be solved.<\/p>\n
Takealot has also re-examined its EFT and Instant EFT payment options, as payment delays cause an issue for it.<\/p>\n
When a customer buys an item using EFT, it can only be reconciled days later. As a result, Takealot has stopped accepting normal EFTs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been getting ready for Black Friday since the beginning of the year,\u201d said Reid.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur whole business is structured in such a way that we correct mistakes from the previous season.\u201d<\/p>\n
Takealot is expecting a massive increase in sales during Black Friday 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":106491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[47064,35,1179,995],"class_list":["post-237412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gadgets","tag-black-friday-2017","tag-headline","tag-kim-reid","tag-takealot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237412"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237704,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237412\/revisions\/237704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}