South Africa’s e-commerce sector is booming. The market is on track to surpass R130 billion in turnover this year. Local online sales are growing at roughly 20% and the sector handles over 100 million shipments annually. According to World Wide Worx, online shopping now represents 8% to 10% of total national retail – expanding at nearly ten times the rate of traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

But the uncomfortable truth is that while revenue is rising, profit margins are shrinking.

The problem isn’t marketing

When profits come under pressure, most merchants reach for the same playbook. They spend more on ads, push harder on sales, or negotiate lower product costs, rarely looking in the right place. The real profit drain doesn’t happen in marketing. It happens silently in fulfilment and last mile delivery. Margin loss is a death by a thousand cuts, from small, hidden inefficiencies spread across delivery networks, fuel surcharges, poor courier choices, and unexamined invoices.

If you want to protect your margins, you need to stop these seven main profit leaks.

1.      Unchecked Last-Mile Costs

Globally, last-mile delivery accounts for up to 53% of total logistics costs, and South Africa is no exception. As customer expectations around free or discounted shipping rise, unmanaged delivery fees quickly erode profit per order. Smart merchants constantly benchmark courier rates and avoid relying on a single provider.

By testing multiple options based on price, location and delivery requirements, you can protect margins without sacrificing speed and reliability. Or choose a platform that offers multiple courier partners.

2.      Unpredictable Fuel Surcharges

Fuel is one of the largest cost variables in local transport. Couriers adjust their fuel levies monthly, making shipping expenses unpredictable. If you only look at your base shipping rates without tracking fluctuating landed costs, your margins will take a hit.

Shipping platforms that provide transparent, up-to-date rates and factor fuel surcharges into the total costs give you a clearer picture of actual spending. This can help you spot the most cost-effective options.

3.      Poor Courier Allocation

No single courier performs equally across the entire country. A provider with great coverage and pricing in Cape Town might deliver poor service or higher rates in Durban or Johannesburg. Assigning orders based on rigid rules leads to higher costs and slower delivery times.

Solutions to this issue do exist, and a good place to start is by matching the courier you’re going with to your specific delivery zone based on real-time cost and success rates.

Shipping solutions can enable your business to connect with multiple courier partners. These platforms support teams in dynamically selecting the best carrier for each delivery area. This is based on current rates, coverage, and delivery performance data. The right partnership should lead to lower shipping costs while improving delivery reliability across provinces.

4.      The Cost of Failed Deliveries

Every failed delivery attempt hits your bottom line. Every return-to-origin attempt results in extra fuel, customer support time, and re-routing. Simple fixes like automated address validation and proactive delivery tracking notifications can significantly reduce these unnecessary attempts, keeping customers informed at every step.

5.      Reverse Logistics Escalation

Returns are a double penalty. Processing a return creates a second fulfilment journey, with extra transport costs, inventory hold-ups, and double handling. Track which products and locations generate the most returns. Understanding your return hotspots helps you spot delivery exceptions early and prevent items from heading back unnecessarily.

6.      Unaudited Billing Discrepancies

Small invoice errors quickly multiply when you’re moving thousands of monthly dispatches. Volumetric weight adjustments, incorrect service charges, and system mismatches are just some of the typical suspects. Without regular invoice audits and automated reconciliation, you are likely overpaying. The right tools match courier invoices against actual shipment details. This assists in identifying billing discrepancies and overcharges before they accumulate across thousands of orders.

7.      Operating in the Dark

You cannot fix what you do not measure. Most e-commerce teams closely track sales, web traffic, and conversion rates, but few have clear visibility over their true fulfilment cost per order or individual courier performance.

Real time logistics dashboards are the only way to catch operational leaks early. They provide visibility and actionable insights from one place, giving you the data you need to make smarter decisions.

Moving Beyond Cheaper Rates

Protecting your margins is not simply about demanding cheaper shipping rates. It requires a shift toward intelligent, data-driven fulfilment.

By adopting multi-courier management strategies, dynamically routing packages based on regional performance, and automated invoice auditing, South African merchants can safeguard their bottom line. In a competitive market, sustainable growth belongs to the merchants who manage their operational details as tightly as their sales funnels.

The profit leaks are there. You just need to find them. 

Written by: Angus LePine Williams, Head of Operations at Shiprazor

Not that long ago, supply chains relied heavily on forecasts. Businesses analysed previous sales, estimated future demand and planned months ahead. Inventory was ordered, transport was booked and warehouse space was allocated based on what companies expected customers to buy.

Forecasting is still an important part of supply chain planning, but business doesn’t always follow the plan.

Customer demand can change far more quickly than it once did. A product can suddenly become popular after receiving attention online, seasonal demand may arrive earlier than expected or economic conditions can change how consumers spend almost overnight. In those moments, businesses that stick rigidly to the original forecast often find themselves reacting too late.

The conversation is gradually shifting. Rather than asking, ‘Did we forecast correctly?’, more organisations are asking, ‘How quickly can we respond when demand changes?’

Forecasts Are the Starting Point, Not the Finish Line

Forecasts remain one of the most valuable planning tools in the supply chain. Manufacturers still need time to produce goods, procurement teams need to secure materials and transport providers need advance notice to plan capacity.

The difference is that forecasts are no longer treated as something that can’t be changed. They’re becoming working plans that evolve as new information comes in.

That flexibility is proving just as valuable as the forecast itself.

Listening to What the Supply Chain Is Telling You

Every customer order, inventory movement and delivery generates information. On its own, that data doesn’t say much. Over time, though, it begins to paint a picture of how demand is changing.

A product that starts selling faster than expected gives planners the opportunity to adjust purchasing before stock runs out. Equally, slower sales can signal that it’s time to rethink future orders before excess inventory starts filling valuable warehouse space.

It’s less about reacting to every fluctuation and more about recognising when a change is becoming a trend.

Responding Takes More Than Good Data

Knowing that demand has changed is only part of the challenge. The real test is whether the rest of the supply chain can respond.

If procurement can’t source materials quickly enough, warehouses don’t have available capacity or transport schedules can’t be adjusted, even the best demand information has limited value.

That’s why visibility has become so important. When procurement, warehousing, transport and inventory teams are working from the same picture, they’re able to make decisions with far greater confidence and far fewer surprises.

Adaptability Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage

No forecast will ever be perfect, and most supply chain professionals know that. The real advantage comes from recognising when reality begins to drift away from the original plan and having the flexibility to respond before customers feel the impact. Businesses will always need forecasts. They provide direction, support investment decisions and help supply chains prepare for what’s ahead. Increasingly, though, success depends just as much on what happens after the forecast is written as it does on the forecast itself.

By Sahil Affriya, Founder & CEO, Shiprazor

I find myself having the same conversations with business owners in late November – always too late to make a difference. They typically have three strong trading days as customers work through their wish lists. Then a public holiday comes and nothing moves, followed by a new week that opens with forty parcels sitting on a late collection and customers on WhatsApp politely asking where their orders are. You know that courtesy has a shelf life.

Most merchants treat that new week as something to survive, but working with them day-to-day has shown us that it is far more useful to use these long weekends as a dry run for the biggest shopping weekend of the year – Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

The upcoming Women’s Day long weekend provides an excellent opportunity to dry run the three pressures that define Black Friday: an order spike, a pause in collections, and a backlog clearing while new orders land. Get it wrong in August and you could lose a few customers; in November, you stand to lose the season.

This matters more each year as larger retailers keep shrinking the gap between order and doorstep, and shoppers expect everyone to match it. Services like Checkers Sixty60 have passed 100 million orders across close to 700 stores. The delivery speed shoppers expect from their grocery run has become the benchmark every other vendor is measured against. More people are placing more orders, and growing less patient with a poor delivery service.

Business owners have roughly ten weeks before an October system freeze locks things down. Here are four things you can do to stress test for Black Friday before it’s too late to make code changes.

1. The gap between purchase and waybill

Your first possible bottleneck sits just past checkout in the time between an order landing and you being able to create a waybill. Ideally, that gap is seconds. If it takes hours, or you are typing an address into a courier portal, you have found your first problem and higher order volumes will only worsen it.

Get ahead of this by tracking what stalls: failed connections, duplicate shipments, orders stuck on pending, anything needing a manual fix. On a well-integrated platform, that count sits near zero and the waybill follows the sale automatically, freeing your team to focus on the customer, not the admin.

2. What the customer sees after dispatch

Late parcels don’t automatically lose customers but silence can. A shopper who cannot see their order assumes the worst and messages you. Each assumption puts the success of your weekend and reputation at risk. Your focus should be on tracking exceptions, non-delivery reports (an NDR is logged when a courier cannot complete a delivery), return-to-origin rates, repeat attempts, and “where is my order” messages piling up.

Many failed deliveries are caused by a wrong or incomplete address, and each one comes with costs: a redelivery, the time cost of a support call, and sometimes the sale itself. Proactive tracking systems that keep customers up to date answer most of those questions before they are asked.

3. Courier performance on your own routes

Most merchants set their courier rules once and never look at them again, and many take advertised transit times at face value rather than as a claim to test. Testing these systems and asking critical questions of your courier partner is the key to getting ahead of any problems.

Testing lets you quantify the value you are getting from each courier and plan for contingencies. Relying on a single courier means your only backup plan is hope. The stress of managing multiple delivery providers, however, pulls your attention away from your customer. Platforms that give you the option to choose from multiple couriers enable stability even when systems are under pressure.

4. Every step that still needs a person

Question every manual process: courier allocation, waybill generation, address correction, customer notifications, status updates. When you are small, doing some of these by hand is manageable; for a business that is scaling, this quickly becomes unsustainable.

Note every point where someone had to step in to complete a routine task and treat each one as something to automate or rewrite. The right setup takes that work off your team entirely: a single integrated platform that turns a sale into a waybill, multi-courier routing that reroutes in seconds, and tracking that keeps customers informed before they need to ask.

Read the data the week after the holiday, fix your three biggest weaknesses by the end of September, and confirm the fixes hold before the freeze. Do that and the calm forty-order weekend and the frantic four-hundred-order one should feel the same to your team. Leave the diagnosis until Black Friday and you will learn the same lessons at a far higher price.

Sahil Affriya, Founder & CEO, Shiprazor