Today spent the day playing taxi shuttling family members to and from the Takealot Conference held at the Gallagher Convention Center in Midrand Johannesburg. Takealot is the South African equivalent of Amazon and has no real competition as yet until Amazon opens up properly.
I personally did not want to attend this event as there was no benefits as my daughter is the specialist with this online platform. My daughter attended with her cousin whos also involved with the buying side of things.
Like most conferences there is always an angle and this time it was about trying to get their 22 000 suppliers to use the in house courier system. Pricing and logistics is my specialty and when they phoned me for my thoughts on how to proceed I only asked who is the courier company being pushed.
Our company is different from the 22 000 other suppliers as we have two accounts in the top 5 and should have some sort of bargaining power. The courier company they were asking everyone to use is pricey and would not be my first or second or even feature in my top 10.
There are some benefits however so if they can match our current prices I would hand over that side of the business. Errors with paper work would be rectified in house as the courier company would be a preferred supplier having offices on site within Takealot. We use a number of trucks weekly for our deliveries and this would definitely benefit us.
We have a new account manager handling our business who took over in mid August. He had changed the led times from 5 days to 3 days and we managed to get this changed back. The 5 day lead time saves on one truck of which we now send only on Mondays and Thursdays to Cape Town. The extra expense of another load weekly or 4 monthly is not economically viable and chows the profit margins.
I am sure plenty of the smaller businesses would have felt pressured into using the in house courier firm especially if they are not up to speed on their costs. You have to know the business inside out and why I felt it was pointless me personally being involved today. A phone call away was better time spent.
The one funny tit bit I did pick up was a woman who used to work for our clients company resigned last year having been offered another role at another company. The role she was offered at this other company was that of being a Takealot specialist. The only problem with this is she only knew how to load the items on the platform and nothing else. The specialist is my daughter who handles the entire account and has been doing so for over 5 years already. Loading items is the basics and the tricky part is everything else including returns. I have o idea if she is still employed or not, but you would get found out pretty quickly in this game when your account is suspended.
