Takealot’s big challenge

They are not the cheapest in imported products, and we can usually get it cheaper somewhere else. Take the Roku 3 player at takealot its R1,828, but you can get somewhere else for R1,799. Now R28 is not alot, bot on 4 products thats R100 savings by going somewhere else.
 
BBotha said:
They are not the cheapest in imported products, and we can usually get it cheaper somewhere else. Take the Roku 3 player at takealot its R1,828, but you can get somewhere else for R1,799. Now R28 is not alot, bot on 4 products thats R100 savings by going somewhere else.
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Takealot provides value in other ways though. They're 100% trustworthy, offer free delivery, relatively hassle-free returns, a technologically savvy customer portal and easy parcel tracking. Not to mention a huge assortment of products, of which some may also be part of your shopping spree.

Even so, I don't buy all my online stuff from Takealot. Often Raru or some other store has better prices. That's just how it goes.
 
BBotha said:
They are not the cheapest in imported products, and we can usually get it cheaper somewhere else. Take the Roku 3 player at takealot its R1,828, but you can get somewhere else for R1,799. Now R28 is not alot, bot on 4 products thats R100 savings by going somewhere else.
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Earn ebucks worth R54.84 and they become cheaper...
 
Well they lost me because of customer service, both on product support, and when returning an item.

Their pricing is also not that great any-more, even on most of their daily deals.

My wife uses them on the odd occasion - her choice, they lost me buying from them every two weeks.
 
Delivery aspect is good and surely sometimes subsidized .Nice place to spend Discovery miles
Difficult to remain loyal to them when competing on Price
 
From the article:
Massmart – which includes Makro, Game, Builder’s Warehouse, and Dion Wired – already has a fair ecommerce presence, which is likely to grow.
The same goes for the JD Group (Incredible Connection and HiFi Corp), and other prominent brick-and-mortar outlets.
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Massmart's online portals suck. Really.
The Builders website is basically a 1990s store locator, with a repository for 20MB PDFs of their specials.
Game is not much better.
The Makro website at least gives stock availability of their products, but their delivery turnaround times (even for in stock items) is incredibly slow. The order process is also pretty clunky and the website doesn't accept their own voucher codes. I use the website to see if they stock something, and then go in-store to get it.
The JD Group websites are also nothing to write home about. IC is okay, but Hifi Corp and others are absolutely horrible.

Takealot will also have to contend with smaller players like Raru, Gumtree, and Bidorbuy, who are building strong brands in the local market.
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Raru, perhaps eventually.
Gumtree or Bidorbuy? Really? You have little to zero protection in terms of delivery, warranty or getting scammed. They are not in the same game at all.
 
eehellfire said:
Gumtree or Bidorbuy? Really? You have little to zero protection in terms of delivery, warranty or getting scammed. They are not in the same game at all.
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These websites are not really fair for comparison as they are classifieds and auction.
 
One thing which is overlooked that all funding runs (at least the ones from Tiger Global / I am not sure about Naspers, but would think as well) are done in USD which will cause huge headaches when the company eventually has to pay back shareholders due to the ZAR-USD having lost over 40% in value in the last few years.

The USD100m raised in 05/2014 was slightly over ZAR 1bn (ZAR10/USD). At today's exchange rate (ZAR16/USD), the company would have to return ZAR 1,6bn to share-holders. When Takealot raised another USD100m in 08/2015 it amounted to about ZAR 1,3bn (ZAR13/USD).

For all Capex related expansions (building warehouses etc) the forex would have been brought into the country close to the time when it was needed and thus the USD funds would have been cleared (i.e. no USD cash in overseas accounts - I also don't think Takealot has a offshore holding company and would think that all cash cleared locally). The company certainly does not make profit and burns opex which would have required them to raise the further USD100m in 2015.

From the above you can easily work out how much profit the company needs to generate to evaluate have enough cash on hand to settle with shareholders. Alternatively the company would have to create shareholder value by saturating the market as the e-commerce leader locally (has not happened in 2 years and will not happen in the future - especially with big changes coming towards end of Q1 / mid Q2) or creating customer stickiness (other than price there is no unique selling proposition - at any given point in time an Alibaba or other international player can come into the market and take over this retail model).
 
eehellfire said:
Gumtree or Bidorbuy? Really? You have little to zero protection in terms of delivery, warranty or getting scammed. They are not in the same game at all.
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BoB does offer buyer protection at the most basic level. I haven't been in a position where I needed to test it yet, so not sure how good it really is.
 
Takealot need to learn how to impliment a search feature, the current implementation is shocking.


I use the site because of ebucks (earn and spend) and because they deliver so fast.
 
It's no Amazon, but I use Takealot more than any other local shop. The Daily Deals are sometimes really decent. Free shipping over... what is it now, R200? Usually arrives next day with no hassles.
 
Totempole said:
BoB does offer buyer protection at the most basic level. I haven't been in a position where I needed to test it yet, so not sure how good it really is.
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I agree that on Bob it is tough to guarantee delivery (we heavily rely on sellers doing this right), but we do have buyer-protection and I can not recall that we have ever refused a legitimate claim for a refund (refunds come out of our pocket first and then we recover funds from the seller). The mediation is often a challenge: i.e. a buyer claims a product is faulty, but refuses to hand the product over to us for inspection unless we pay him or a seller ships an original product and the buyer replaces it with a broken one (it does not match the serial of the product shipped by the seller on the waybill).

Returns and warranty aspects are generally time-intensive and if it is not done right opens up a business to massive fraud and product churn.

I agree however that you can not compare bidorbuy (a marketplace) with a SKU-based platform such as Takealot. I also find it strange that media nowadays puts us into the classifieds-category. We have always been transactional with higher transactional throughput than most (right now 300 trans/sec).
 
^^ that must be new... BoB used to rely on the seller providing the refund, otherwise the buyer is left in the cold.

There have been various posts on mybb about just that.
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
I agree that on Bob it is tough to guarantee delivery (we heavily rely on sellers doing this right), but we do have buyer-protection and I can not recall that we have ever refused a legitimate claim for a refund (refunds come out of our pocket first and then we recover funds from the seller). The mediation is often a challenge: i.e. a buyer claims a product is faulty, but refuses to hand the product over to us for inspection unless we pay him or a seller ships an original product and the buyer replaces it with a broken one (it does not match the serial of the product shipped by the seller on the waybill).

Returns and warranty aspects are generally time-intensive and if it is not done right opens up a business to massive fraud and product churn.

I agree however that you can not compare bidorbuy (a marketplace) with a SKU-based platform such as Takealot. I also find it strange that media nowadays puts us into the classifieds-category. We have always been transactional with higher transactional throughput than most (right now 300 trans/sec).
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But there's a cap on liability, is there not?
 
Takealot is awesome, order before 2pm and get it the next day.
Their service has dropped from like an immediate reply to maybe a next day reply which isn't bad, I cant comment further but this was during the holiday period so it's understandable.

Also I can buy things online instead of going to the shop, coffee, deodorant etc.
 
I support Takealot mainly because of their fast delivery and good prices, i don't know if rip-off players like IC can actually compete with what i'm currently getting
 
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