While overall online retail is increasing by 25% year-on- year, Black Friday’s online stats are pretty much doubling every year.
Still, only around 4% of South Africans shop online regularly, and in terms of overall sales, online makes up just 1.4% in SA, compared with more than 13% in the US.
But if ever there was a retail opportunity to entice a reluctant online shopper, it’s Black Friday.
Jazelle Naidoo was among those who decided to give the mall madness a miss this Black Friday, going online to buy a pair of shoes which TotalSports had on sale for R499.
When she’d heard nothing further by late Monday afternoon, she made enquiries, and was told her order had been “returned”.
“They said they had no stock of the shoe to give me because it was ‘oversold’.
“And on top of all of that, I’m told I have to wait 7-14 days for my refund!”
Overselling on Black Friday is not just a South African thing.
US hardware store Lowe’s was among the retailers which oversold items this Black Friday as a result of overloaded servers not being able to update sales versus stock in real time.
It oversold a snow blower but offered those affected a near-identical product at the same price.
But not all companies “make a plan” for their customers who lose out due to overselling.
I asked TotalSports brand owner TFG what went wrong on Black Friday this year.
“TFG’s real time stock system worked very effectively for 364 days of the year, but Black Friday volumes unexpectedly compromised our order processing queuing system this year,” said Kathryn Sakalis, TFG’s business head for marketing and e-Commerce.
“It was a new learning for us and we will ensure that this is addressed so that it doesn’t happen to our customers again.”
As for why Naidoo and others are being made to wait seven to 14 days for a refund, Sakalis said technically the company was not processing refunds as it did not take a customer’s money until the product was dispatched from its distribution centres.
“We simply put an ‘auth’ on the card, which secures the order. In the case of a cancelled order, we release the ‘auth’ almost immediately, but the banks still need to process this and release the funds to the card.
“It’s not unknown for bank to hold onto ‘auths’, so if a customer who has paid by bank card has not seen a release of their funds within 48 hours, we recommend that they contact their bank directly and ask when this release will happen.”
My advice: if you had your Black Friday bargain hunting spoilt by online “overselling”, ask the company for some form of reasonable compensation.
The problem with very large companies which have scores of branches throughout the land is the employees who deal with customers often tweak or totally misinterpret policies devised by head office.
And not in a way that’s good for customers – or the company’s reputation.
A few years ago I investigated a classic example of this. A man went to a branch of the decor chain @Home, to buy two coffee tables. He was told they’d be available within 10 working days, and made to pay an extra R350 as a delivery fee. Standard practice, you may be thinking, but the fee wasn’t being levied for the delivery of the furniture from the shop to the customer’s home – he was planning to get them there in his own vehicle.
No, that R350 was to cover the cost of having those tables transported from @Home’s warehouse to the shop!
Head office quickly cleared that up as a misunderstanding by store staff, including the manager, and the customer was refunded.
Sadly, it seems such madness was not an isolated case.
Pieter Halgreen recently responded to a Game advert for a stove “special”.
But when he went to his local Game store – in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal, he was told he’d have to pay an extra R250 to get a stove delivered from the warehouse to the store – and he’d have to wait seven to 14 days for delivery after making payment.
After he “made a big fuss’ the store waived the R250 charge.
Game owner Massmart confirmed that delivery fees are only charged for delivery to an address supplied by a customer.
“It is not Game's policy to charge for delivery from a warehouse or a supplier to the Game store,” said communications executive Phumzile Siboza. And then she said something very few corporates can bring themselves to say.
“We are so sorry and embarrassed.”
That beats the hell out of the tired, meaningless: “We apologise for the inconvenience.”..