Massmart, in its bid to become the leading retail and wholesale eCommerce destination in South Africa, is reaping the benefits of re-setting and upgrading its online order fulfilment infrastructure.

This started with creating a centralised eCommerce Pickup & Delivery capability comprising approximately 60 specialists across functions which include eCommerce Operations, Customer Operations and Inventory Optimisation.

This team is supported by a dedicated group of Product Management & Tech experts focused on enabling and accelerating its efforts. This has resulted in a significantly improved in-store Pickup collection process that now takes less than a minute.

The benefits of this structure extend beyond in-store pickup to also include greatly improved customer delivery service levels. Merlin Otto, Vice President for Pickup and Delivery at Massmart says, “In addition to our in-house team (including WumDrop), we have partnered with the most reliable couriers in the market and unlocked the capability to deliver certain products directly to customers, from our mega distribution centres in Gauteng, Western Cape and KZN. The result is that during the month of June, 80% of all Makro orders were delivered within 2 days, whilst 92% of Makro pickup orders were available for next day collection.”

Otto adds that the impact of the new structure is greatly assisted by information derived from a daily online customer satisfaction survey that has led to the identification and rapid resolution of customer queries. Makro and Game’s Halfway Day sale at the end of June served as further validation of these upgrades, where order processing mostly exceeded the customer promise, despite order volumes reaching Black Friday levels during the promotion.