Massmart plans to do the most for its customers this upcoming Black Friday
Massmart, one of SA's largest consumer goods distributor that owns local brands such as Game, Makro, Builders and Dion Wired states that it will be ready for this year's Black Friday.
According to the company, in a recent GeoPoll survey that looked at consumer shopping preferences found that Game and Makro are perceived to have the best Black Friday deals.
Massmart said: "The survey that was conducted nationally in August, polled 1000 consumers who are aged 25years old and up, belong to LSM 5-10 and are primary household purchasers."
"50% of the survey respondents said they shop at Massmart stores over Black Friday with 70% of those respondents saying that Game is their first-choice destination for Black Friday deals," said Massmart.
The company noted that this insight is supported by the fact that last year it saw a 24% increase in Game sales and 33% sales increase at Builders (appliances like aircons did well) over the 3 day Black Friday period.
"Makro alone, made its first R200 million within 15 hours on day one which is equivalent to what some of our online competitors made for the entire Black Friday trading period. In total, in 2018 we reported group sales of R1.8 Billion over the three day (Fri-Sun) Black Friday period," said Massmart.
Its ambition is to execute the best Black Friday experience for its customers.
"So in addition to selecting the best value lines to appeal to our customers’ expectations, every year we have post-Black Friday reviews and conduct research into what did and didn’t work,"
"Something’s that worked well last year, which we will continue, include Uber in partnership with Makro, offering an R50 discount on rides to and from their stores. This was a first in South Africa" said Makro.
Last year Makro also introduced a new mobile pay-point system to assist customers purchasing a small number of items to pay while standing in the queue.
"This Mobile POS was successful, busting over 7km of the queue. Our research also found that a significant amount of customers preferred stores to open for longer during this trading period," said Makro.
"As such we will once again have extended trading hours at selected stores. For instance, 93 out of 122 Game stores in SA, and 13 out of the 28 on the rest of the continent will be trading at midnight. We will also have 29 Game stores trading from 6am. As with previous years we will have a standard delivery fee regardless of radius to our stores. A delivery fee of R90 will be charged across Game, DionWired and Makro stores," said Makro.
"We have identified what hasn’t worked and will implement various interventions to better manage the influx of customers and meet their expectations," said Makro.
For example, as a means of facilitating orderly customer access, the company will increase the number of staff and security at all their stores and implement well-supervised snake-queues in the staging areas outside the entrances of some of our busiest stores.
To improve fulfilment, they will be servicing specific Black Friday online orders from their Distribution Centre rather than from individual stores.
"We will also ensure that a team of high-transaction-volume IT specialists are available to quickly resolve any online technology problems that might arise during the Black Friday promotions," said Makro.
Written by: Gabriella Steyn.
Guzzle Media
