Here’s an idea for the insomniacs and 2am worriers — why don’t you take the opportunity to get in a Woolies Dash order?
It might sound like a peculiar way to spend the wee hours of the morning but, you see, unless you book your slot on Woolworths’ delivery app then, there’s a high chance you won’t get a space for the coming day at all.
It’s a common anecdote, from Joburg to Cape Town. And, one night when I couldn’t sleep, I actually did it myself, in a bid to nail down a hen’s-teeth Woolies delivery slot.
Woolworths launched its trial delivery app, Dash, in December, notionally billed as a direct competitor to Checkers’ hugely popular Sixty60 delivery service, which, as Business Insider puts it, "has been eating its competitors’ lunch".
Yet seven months later, Woolworths’ app is still in trial mode — and the retailer is fooling no-one. It is all the more lamentable because Woolies, along with Pick n Pay, was the first to launch an online delivery service, many years ago. Checkers wasn’t in the game then.
However, when Covid hit, Checkers ramped up its Sixty60 delivery service — promising deliveries within an hour — and promptly cornered the market. At last count, it offered the service at 157 of its 241 stores.
There’s a business school case study here: being first isn’t necessarily the competitive advantage it’s cracked up to be, if you do it badly. You can still arrive late and prevail, if you have a better product.
Woolies, at this point, is eating the dust of Checkers’ Evel Knievel delivery drivers zipping around our streets. The demand is such that Checkers has just announced you might have to settle for a delivery that’ll come "just now" instead of in 60 minutes.
Were this a rating, Sixty60 would score eight out of 10. While the app is fantastic, the stock can be limited — but the communication is excellent, and it’s extremely fast.
Dash, on the other hand, would score five out of 10 — because users just can’t get a slot to shop in the first place. The rest of it is fine — the app design is good, the shoppers rarely mess up — but for a food retailer, it must do the one thing it is meant to: allow people to buy food.
The jury is still out on Pick n Pay. It has just rebranded the old Bottles app as "Pick n Pay Asap!", but while the design looks impressive, it remains to be seen whether the retailer has smoothed out the wrinkles in its ordering process and delivery times.
Which leaves a clear winner right now. Not for nothing has Sixty60 been downloaded more than 1-million times. It also scooped Food24’s award for top food delivery app, MTN’s people’s choice award for app of the year and Memeburn’s best app of 2020.
What this battle of the blitz between the big three of groceries illustrates, is that you can’t only do part of a process well. From beginning to end, fulfilment has to hum. Just being okay isn’t enough in the lightning-paced, logistically terrifying world of online shopping. And competition has ramped up during the lockdown.
A surprise surrender
Woolworths’ failure to nail down food deliveries is even more surprising when you consider what the brand is all about.
First, this is the company that leads in food innovations and trends. It should have been all over this. Second, its customer base is at the top end of the income pool and largely in urban areas, so was ripe for the adoption of fast food deliveries.
Still, it is belatedly getting in the game. This week, Woolies announced that online food sales grew 117% in the year to March — which sounds impressive, until you consider that this is just 2.3% of its total SA food sales.
Marks & Spencer (M&S), its loose equivalent in the UK, has smartly outsourced some food deliveries to that country’s third-largest delivery company, Ocado. It offers one-hour slots, seven days a week. What’s especially useful for customers is that they can do their M&S shop and buy all kinds of other goods from elsewhere in one order.
It all worked pretty swell for M&S until last Friday, when a couple of robots collided at an Ocado warehouse in Erith, southeast London, and a fire broke out. As the BBC explained, the fire at the highly automated factory meant that thousands of the 150,000 orders the company delivers every week were cancelled.
Ocado aside, grocery deliveries are super-efficient in the US and UK — mostly thanks to Amazon. And if you’ve got Amazon Prime, which costs £7.99 a month, you qualify for endless free same-day and next-day deliveries of everything you can think of. You can even ask Amazon’s artificial intelligence assistant, Alexa, to put through your order — by speaking directly to your Amazon Echo Dot speaker.
Same-day deliveries are coming
We’re still light years away from that kind of service in SA, though Sixty60 is probably the closest we’ve come yet. Having your Nespresso pods in hand an hour after you order them, rather than days later, has the makings of a caffeine-drenched fantasy.
Takealot is SA’s equivalent to Amazon, which is reflected in the fact that sales surged 65% in the year to R8.7bn, while its loss narrowed to R101m.
While Takealot isn’t getting your package to you on the same day, often it arrives the next day. And its offshoots Mr D and Superbalist are also jacked. For an extra fee of between R80 and R100, depending on your spend, Superbalist offers same-day deliveries in Cape Town, Joburg and Pretoria if you order before 11am. It’s no wonder these Naspers babies announced a sharp jump in revenues recently.
The newest to the delivery party is Dis-Chem, which has just debuted its trial DeliverD service. It promises that goods will be at your door within 60 minutes, within 10km of a store, for a flat delivery fee of R60. I tried it and it was spot-on.
My only observation is that Dis-Chem has yet to add the full range of its products to the app, so what you can buy is limited.
In happier times, when the alcohol industry isn’t being crippled by booze bans, DGB — which owns such wineries as Boschendal and Bellingham, and is also the agency for the likes of Steenberg Vineyards and Bombay Sapphire gin — has got fast delivery sorted.
Order a couple of cases and you’ll be sampling them the next day.
Outsourcing can work, and fail
The third-party shopping apps such as Zulzi and OneCart cost extra, but in Covid times, when you’re home-bound, they’re a godsend. They cover a range of stores — and can even get your Chuckles and Woolies items to you when Dash has disappointed again.
Zulzi launched a new version of its app a few weeks ago. It was a user nightmare that I imagine cost it some customers, but the experience has improved since.
Still, if you were to read the bad reviews for both brands on Hellopeter — as well as those for Pick n Pay’s Bottles app — you’d never use any of them, ever.
I am clearly the forgiving sort, because even if sometimes they run late and occasionally you get a shopper who messes up your order, mostly these services work.
The other crowd that gets repeatedly slammed for glacial delivery speed is OneDayOnly. My friends have narrated horror experiences of OneDayOnly to me, and one user on Hellopeter observed that the SA Post Office provides a better service. That does not bode well for the brand.
Many local businesses are at the mercy of courier companies, which don’t do their brands any favours. For example, Yuppiechef provides a great service — but uses Aramex, which is totally hit and miss.
To take another example, I ordered olive oil from a tiny Karoo outfit in December. It was a nightmare, unfortunately common to many — first the courier company handed over someone else’s package, then it took another two weeks to do a swap.
Of course, the unrest in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and the destruction of shops and warehouses are not going to help. Log onto most online stores right now and they have a note indicating delays in delivery in KZN and Gauteng or, worst-case scenario, no delivery at all.
For small businesses which are still operating but can’t get any couriers to fulfil orders, this is particularly problematic.
Thankfully, there is now another option: UberConnect, a side business of the Uber franchise which picks up parcels and delivers them for a fee.
I used UberConnect for the first time a few days ago to have something delivered from a company whose usual delivery guy couldn’t leave home because of the unrest. The Uber parcel delivery service is basic, easy and inexpensive.
Lockdowns may have accelerated the process, but South Africans have more delivery options than ever. Some, such as Checkers, have excelled; some, such as Woolies, have fluffed their lines; others, such as Superbalist, are getting into the game fast.
Me, I’m still holding out for an avalanche of same-day deliveries and doing a Woolies online shop at a normal hour — Alexa, get me Amazon!
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.