Retailers scramble to innovate amid e-commerce sales bonanza in 2021
RETAILERS may have grappled with tighter Covid-19 restrictions, and the spate of civil unrest in July but their e-commerce sales went through the roof as shopping patterns evolved.
The upswing in online retail sales was a tailwind for retailers in 2021 with Statista market and consumer data projecting 31.6 million South Africans could be converted to online shopping by 2024.
The upswing comes as the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way South Africans work, school and play with a growing number of consumers avoiding shopping malls and opting to make use of on-demand grocery apps on their smartphones.
Big retailers have taken advantage of the growth in online shopping, including Pick n Pay, which rebranded its on-demand delivery app Bottles to Pick n Pay asap! in July.
Pick n Pay’s omnichannel retail executive, John Bradshaw, said last week since its relaunch in July, the service had delivered growth rates of more than 350 percent year-on-year, with a significant increase in new and returning customers.
“Popularity in the app continues to grow and a research company – analysing 55 000 respondents’ actual transactions – showed that asap! is the fastest growing on-demand service following its rebranding,” Bradshaw said. He said Pick n Pay asap! had reported 600 percent growth in first time customers since July.
The Pick n Pay asap! service promises same day delivery in as little as 60 minutes and has stiff competition in Shoprite Group’s Checkers Sixty60 and the Woolworths’s Woolies Dash online services.
The Checkers Sixty60 on-demand grocery delivery app, which also delivers groceries within an hour, has grown exponentially since its launch in 2019 from eight stores to 233 stores across the country. According to Shoprite, Sixty60 has become the number one grocery app in the country, with more than 1.5 million app downloads.
This month the Shoprite Group, South Africa’ biggest corporate employer, announced big plans for Sixty60, including the creation of jobs.
Shoprite said it would create a new joint venture company with Checkers Sixty60 logistics partner, the RTT Group with the aim of advancing the technology, learnings and intellectual property created to date.
Shoprite chief executive Pieter Engelbrecht said he anticipated this transaction would add to the more than 4 000 jobs already created by Sixty60. With the number of people no longer looking for work standing at a staggering 44.4 percent, the promise of jobs is good news.
“The benefits arising from formalising this relationship with RTT On-Demand should extend beyond our customers to also include our employees, suppliers and shareholders and we are incredibly pleased to be moving forward with our e-commerce plans on this basis,”Engelbrecht said.
Woolworths said over the past three years it had invested more than R1 billion in its digital capabilities in South Africa. The group’s Woolies Dash, is currently available out of 18 stores with the group planning to grow this service by more than doubling its coverage area over the next year.
Woolworths launched WCellar to showcase an exclusive and curated wine offer specially for its customers and became the first South African fashion retailer to offer the virtual Beauty try-on and consultation service.
Woolworths head of online and mobile, Liz Hillock,said the group’s vision was to be a truly connected, omnichannel retailer.
“We’re experimenting, learning and iterating to ensure we constantly optimise our services, while exploring and utilising the latest technologies and services,” said Hillock.
The Foschini Group (TFG) boosted its ominichannel offering with the appointment Superbalist founders Claude Hanan and Luke Jedeikin to become the largest, most reliable and most profitable e-commerce destination on the continent.
According to Online Retail in South Africa 2021, a study by World Wide Worx with the support of Mastercard, Standard Bank, and Platinum Seed, growth in online retail came to 66 percent in 2020, bringing South Africa’s online retail to R30.2bn.
“The most astonishing aspect of this total is that it is more than double the R14.1bn reached in 2018, in just two years,” says World Wide Worx managing director Arthur Goldstuck, principal analyst on the research project.
BUSINESS REPORT