But for the thousands of people who did not receive their orders by Christmas Day‚ it turned out to be the season of "wait a lot". And they were not impressed.
"Absolutely pathetic customer service‚" wrote Ronelle Singh on the retailer’s Facebook page. "I placed an order and paid additional delivery to receive my item on Christmas Eve — a week later and still no delivery after numerous follow-up calls to them‚ and no feedback…"
"Takealot’s service delivery was beyond appalling this Christmas!" wrote Kirsten Coutsoudis. "You weren’t able to deliver my Christmas presents by the promised dates‚ sent half packages‚ managers don’t call back when they say they will…"
But Takealot’s chief marketing officer Julie-Anne Walsh rejects the suggestion that the company over-promised and under-delivered‚ saying that "can’t be statistically validated and is not accurate".
Asked to quantify Takealot’s late deliveries‚ Walsh would say only that it was "a single-digit percentage of total orders" — the same as in previous years.
She gave the number of successful orders — not total orders — processed in November and December as "more than 650,000".
I think it is safe to assume that "single digit" percentage of late orders was somewhere between 5% and 9%‚ or the company would surely have said "less than 5%"‚ so I am going to go with 7.5%.
That puts the number of late deliveries at 48,750‚ and given that the total order number would have been far higher than 650 000‚ let’s round that up to 50,000 Takelot orders that were not fulfilled.
eCommerce analyst Arthur Goldstuck‚ who heads the research company World Wide Worx‚ said it was "generally agreed" that the acceptable late delivery rate was "a matter of a fraction of a percent rather than a percent or more".
