Matthew Burbidge FOOD
Woolworths, the home of the unblemished tomato, launched its stylish site www.inthebag.co.za last week and is betting its repu-tation that its tomatoes will arrive unbruised, slightly chilled and on time.
Jessica Knight, CEO of inthebag, said while its client base is currently relatively small, its business model conservatively plans on having 300 000 regular shoppers by 2009.
“We’re not building a field of dreams and hoping they will come … we are providing a credible offer and customers will be tempted, or persuaded to buy from inthebag,” said Knight, noting that the 1,8-million to two million South Africans with Web access aren’t faced with many shopping propositions. The company has spent R32-million on the infrastructure. There are two dedicated distribution centres with separate chilled, frozen and room-temperature warehouses that will deliver the goods to selected suburbs in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The customers’ orders are collected from the warehouses and then delivered (for R35), between 8am and 10pm weekdays only, in branded trucks. The Cape Town business started last week with Jo’burg following soon and, as a treat, the company is offering free groceries for a year for one lucky shopper, as soon as you fill out the registration form. The Woolies website will offer nutritional advice and recipes, which should make the whole experience more satisfying – and this is where the site can really add value. Of course, Woolies is not the only place you can buy food, but some of the other options left a bad taste in the mouth of Chris Botha, who spent three months in a house in the Northern suburbs literally living off the Internet for an Andersen Consulting research project on e-commerce. Botha used five sites for his three meals a day: the kosher Easybuy, Thrupps, Megashopper, Clicknpay and Webshop, and while he didn’t starve, he often found their menus wanting. He couldn’t buy fast food and made do with frozen meals, typically a crumbed chicken breast with stuffing and grilled vege-tables. A virtual bachelor for the project’s duration, he yearned for pizza and some of the Woolworths range of high-quality TV- dinners.
On average, Botha found prices were about 6% more expensive than in “real” shops and delivery charges ranged from R30 to R45. He found that while he could buy almost everything, he couldn’t find his favourites and the range of products was not broad enough.
Goods were delivered that day or the following day, depending on when he placed his order, but he often found the times weren’t convenient for him – some stores don’t deliver after 5.30pm or on weekends. Botha said the three main incentives to shop online are price, variety and convenience and now the real challenge for companies lies in persuading people to change their shopping habits, or persuading those with Net access to become online shoppers.
Another challenge will be to get South Africans to part with their money online – the crime-conscious nation seems to harbour an abiding suspicion that someone will steal their money while it is in transit through cyberspace. Botha lashed out at the Mr Delivery site, which has been promising online ordering and delivery within the hour for months and months, and now jauntily suggests “working up an appetite” while it finishes its site. However good the service, most of us will still have to stride the aisles with our shopping cart occasionally, but for South Africans living in the United States, the smell of the braai when you enter Die Vleis Kombuis via AA Biltong at http://lekker.safeshopper.com could prove irresistible. Alongside the South African man-sized coil of boerewors, there are wet and dry biltong for sale, pork sausages and chilled Melktert, which will be FedEx’ed to your door the next day from the “purveyors of fine SA food” in Charlotte, North Carolina. The company has also cunningly bundled small pictures of essential ingredients – the sight of the yellow Knorr Aromat shaker (at $2,25) or the creamy glass bottle of Crosse&Blackwell will probably have the homesick in tears. And for those who trust their postman, there is the Wine Exchange in Southern California, offering a range of South African wines.