South African e-commerce platforms are preparing to handle about 240 000 incoming parcels during the Black Friday online shopping frenzy at the end of November – just from Shein and Temu.
According to Garry Marshall, CEO of the South African Express Parcel Association, the online shipping industry has seen “phenomenal growth” and, at current levels, imports about 1 000 packages every day, mostly from China.
But it’s the anticipated Black Friday peak that heralds “an unstoppable tsunami”, despite prevailing issues regarding import duties involving heavily discounted shopping sites.
Marshall said these issues would most likely be resolved because “although the tax man has to take his chunk, it’s not going to stop e-commerce”.
Addressing a supply chain gathering at last week’s Sapics Spring Summit in Johannesburg, he said even though “there are big issues at the moment in terms of levelling the playing fields through duties, customs regulations and concessions”, the expectation is that it won’t stop sites like Shein and Temu.
In addition, the parcel industry is ready to meet the e-commerce avalanche.
“Some of our members are gearing themselves up for the peak. At least one of our members is automating at a helluva rate.”
He said much of the preparation boiled down to being capacity-ready when demand spiked.
“Service providers analyse what their system is capable of. They understand what their constraints are in terms of volume, and so they plan for that. A lot of work goes into being able to restrict or control the volume in your system so that you don’t overload or collapse it.”
Evert de Ruiter, principal consultant at Auctoro Advisory, said the preparedness of online retail platforms for Black Friday’s deluge became more visible closer to the time.
He said as a rule of thumb, shoppers should guard against over-promising, especially when sites “say yes to everything”.
More advanced sites, indicating that something might take time before it’s available, are usually indicative of “good expectation management, which is where one’s system and data must be accurate,” De Ruiter said.
