The next few weeks are the time for retailers to find out, before peak-season technology freezes make fixing problems much harder.
South Africa’s online retail market is growing at around 22.5% this year. For retailers heading into Black Friday and the festive season, there is a fairly obvious question behind that number: what happens if your business suddenly has to process, pack and deliver 20% more orders? It is a question Sahil Affriya, founder and CEO of multi-courier logistics platform Shiprazor, believes retailers should be answering now, rather than in November.
The newly released Online Retail in South Africa 2026 report, produced by World Wide Worx in partnership with Mastercard, Peach Payments and Ask Afrika, and supported by Shiprazor, forecasts that South Africa’s online retail market will reach R159 billion in 2026.
On a turnover-weighted basis, the market is expanding at approximately 22.5% this year, between five and ten times the rate of physical retail. The report also shows just how much bigger the market has become: online retail is expected to add more turnover during 2026 alone than the entire South African online retail market generated in 2020.
That is good news for ecommerce. But growth at that pace has consequences. More orders mean more pressure on stock systems, warehouses, customer-service teams, courier capacity and returns. And with retailers typically reluctant to make significant changes to business-critical technology once peak trading begins, the window to find and fix weaknesses is getting smaller.
“Twenty-two percent growth sounds fantastic until you start thinking about what it means on a busy Monday morning in November,” says Affriya. “If there are suddenly hundreds more orders sitting in your system, can your warehouse get them out? Can your courier partners absorb the volume? And, importantly, can you see quickly enough when something has gone wrong?”
Affriya says retailers don’t need to predict their exact Black Friday volumes. They do need to know where their operation starts to strain, and have a plan for absorbing additional orders when demand moves beyond expectations. Therefore, he suggests focusing on a few practical areas before peak-season systems are locked down.
Prepare for unpredictable order volumes
Testing whether a website can handle increased traffic is only one part of peak-season preparation. Retailers should put the entire order journey under pressure, from checkout and stock allocation through to picking, packing, dispatch and delivery. Testing different order volumes can show where delays or manual work start creeping in, giving teams time to address those pressure points before peak demand arrives.
“Don’t just test whether someone can buy from you, test whether you can actually fulfil what you’ve sold,” says Affriya.
Build the right courier mix
Retailers should understand how much additional volume their delivery and fulfilment partners can accommodate, particularly on their busiest routes and trading days. That also means looking at the mix of courier partners available and understanding which are best suited to different delivery areas, service requirements, costs and order volumes.
They should also know what happens when things don’t go according to plan. If one delivery option becomes constrained, is there another available? How quickly can orders be moved? Who makes that decision?
“Peak season exposes dependencies that are easy to ignore during normal trading,” says Affriya. “If your delivery operation relies heavily on one provider or one process, you want to know where that risk sits before volumes spike.”
Keep shipping costs under control
Higher order volumes don’t automatically translate into better margins if fulfilment and delivery costs rise with them. Retailers should understand what they are spending to fulfil and deliver each order, and where unnecessary costs start appearing as volumes increase.
That includes looking beyond headline courier rates to factors such as delivery area, service level, failed delivery attempts and the cost of moving orders between providers when capacity becomes constrained. Having multiple delivery options gives retailers more room to balance cost, capacity and service during peak periods.
Find and reduce fulfillment bottlenecks
A retailer may have enough website capacity to handle twice its usual traffic while its warehouse can only comfortably process 20% more orders. Another may have warehouse capacity but run into courier collection limits.
Affriya recommends retailers model what happens if order volumes increase by 20%, 30% and even 50% over a short period, then use those scenarios to identify where additional capacity, alternative processes or courier options may be needed.
“You are not trying to predict the future perfectly. You are looking for the point where something breaks, so you can fix it before peak season.”
Spot problems early enough to act
When thousands of orders are moving through an operation, problems are inevitable. The bigger issue is how long it takes the retailer to spot them.
Teams should be able to see orders that haven’t left the warehouse, missed collections, parcels that have stopped moving and failed delivery attempts without waiting for a customer to complain. The earlier those exceptions are visible, the more opportunity there is to reroute an order, change delivery options or intervene before the problem reaches the customer.
That matters because the delivery is ultimately the part of an online transaction that happens in the customer’s world.
“The customer doesn’t care which system failed or which courier had a capacity problem,” says Affriya. “They bought from the retailer. That’s the brand they associate with the experience.”
South Africa’s online retail market has now reached a point where rapid growth is taking place on top of an already substantial base. For Affriya, that makes peak-season preparation less about preparing for one unusually busy weekend and more about building an operation that can absorb higher volumes without service levels slipping or fulfilment and delivery costs eroding the value of that growth. “Growth is what every retailer wants,” he says. “The question is whether the rest of the business is ready when it arrives.”
