The future of South Africa’s online commerce: from convenience to customer control

E-commerce in South Africa continues to expand, and the next phase will reward businesses that meet customers where they are today (such as enabling commerce via cash, COD, kiosks and call centres) while building toward what they increasingly expect: reliable choice, speed and experiences they can control.

From convenience to control

“Convenience is ‘then,’ and the future is control… Customers want to control what they order, when they order, how they order.” — Kgomotso Rammutla, Director of Digital, KFC Africa

Kgomotso highlighted Pizza Hut’s innovation through time, starting as the first to allow customers to order pizza delivery over the phone and, in the early 90s, over the internet. What convenience looks like now is very different: Now customers expect finer control over how, when and where they order, pay and receive. The goal shifts from transactional convenience to experiential control: consistent, predictable journeys across channels and circumstances.

Implications

• Make status, timing and delivery options transparent
• Offer meaningful choice, then default to the customer’s last successful preference

The next growth arc: high-urgency categories

As Alex Wörz at Mr D explained, food and grocery delivery offerings have established on-demand habits. The next wave is lower-frequency but high-urgency categories such as pharmacy, baby products, pet care and gifting. The level of urgency reshapes merchandising strategies, inventory placement and SLAs.

Implications

• Expand into urgency-prone verticals that fit your brand promise
• Rank discovery according to urgency signals (time of day, recent re-orders, local stock)

Managing complexity with smart simplicity

Category expansion creates internal and customer complexity. The countermeasure to this is disciplined personalisation that declutters discovery for the consumer and lets them shop relevant offerings with ease. With this, data quality becomes the constraint. The work is turning raw data into relevant customer experiences.

“Data is the new gold… in many cases, at the moment, still only a lump of coal that requires more refinement.” — Alex Wörx, CEO at Mr D

Implications

• Replace generic product pushes with session- and history-aware recommendations
• Track simplicity as a KPI (measuring failed searches, reversals, edits per cart, even cat abandonment)

Trust as a growth throttle in travel

Travel is low-frequency, high-value and emotionally salient. As Linda Scott-Hayward at Travelstart pointed out, travel customers want the same amount of speed, personalisation and instant self-service that they’ve come to expect from other online commerce experiences. 

Since travel purchases are usually higher value, it’s important that customers feel they can trust the platform that they’re using to browse, compare and pay for travel bookings. That means instant, smooth UI and UX for self-service bookings and immediate human help when things go wrong or they need further assistance – not an AI agent. 

Implications

• Make the travel provider’s responsibilities explicit when it comes to disruptions, refunds and schedule changes
• Use automation for routine tasks, while keeping fast human lanes for exceptions or emergencies

Payments: reduce friction while broadening inclusion

Payment failure remains a major drop-off point, with 71% of consumers reporting that they will abandon their cart after a failed transaction. 

Both Alex and Kgomotso spoke to the difficulty of running a digital platform in a country where cash and card remain the dominant payment methods: It’s difficult to balance the security offered by online transactions and 3DS authentication methods alongside accessibility and a frictionless customer journey. 

Digital wallet methods such as Apple Pay and Google Pay can raise first-time success rates, but offering cash on delivery also remains important for building accessibility and trust. Some brands, such as KFC, are guiding customers from analogue to digital through phased journeys rather than forcing a cliff-edge shift. In high-ticket categories, blended tender via loyalty and rewards is expanding access.

“We're not fighting cash, but we're helping customers move through those stages to use different payment methods going forward.” — Kgomotso Rammutla, Director of Digital, KFC Africa

Implications

• Offer card, digital wallets and Pay by bank methods as options, plus cash-compatible flows where relevant
• Treat 3D Secure as risk-based, not universal – dynamic 3DS can be useful for managing this
• Support rewards-plus-cash/card combinations for large baskets

Marketplace vs direct: “mall” vs “flagship”

Aggregators such as Mr D provide reach, variety and cost-effective demand aggregation beyond dense city centres. Owned channels, such as an individual KFC branch, provide first-party data, loyalty and deeper relationships. The practical strategy is a coherent standard across both.

In this way, aggregators can be seen as the digital mall that allow customers to browse a wide variety of options, and the individual brand is a flagship store that customers might find outside of a mall – but they would expect to have a similar experience in both. 

“Platforms such as [Mr D] can aggregate large amounts of demand and then bring it to the likes of KFC, so there's already a complementary relationship within that. And at the end of the day, it's about bringing the right channels to the consumer and, ultimately, the consumer will pick what's convenient.” — Alex Wörx, CEO at Mr D

Implications

• Define channel-agnostic standards for checkout, tracking and support that can work no matter where customers shop
• Use marketplaces to grow reach, and your “flagship” app or site to compound lifetime value and build your brand

Personalisation without the “creep”

As Alex pointed out, customers will exchange their data for personalisation and convenience – but only if it’s relevant to them and it helps them find what they’re looking for. Communication should be kept useful, not intrusive, to avoid feeling “creepy”. 

Companies should also prepare for agent-initiated shopping that begins off-platform by ensuring product feeds, availability and pricing are machine-readable and consistent.

Implications

• Use consented, value-forward data collection to personalise the customer experience, and show tangible benefits
• Maintain real-time, structured data for external agents and discovery 

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Watch the full panel interview on YouTube here. 

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