South Africa’s township economy is not only facing a demand problem. For many businesses, the bigger challenge may be getting the right products to the right place at a competitive price.

The 2026 Rural and Township Economy Report highlights significant procurement and distribution challenges facing businesses outside the country’s major commercial centres. According to the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the dtic), informal businesses face higher procurement costs and limited access to formal distribution channels, while consumers can face higher effective prices because of limited product variety and quality.

For the supply-chain industry, this points to a problem that sits further upstream than the shop itself.

If a business cannot source products reliably, competitively and in sufficient volume, its ability to compete is constrained before the customer even walks through the door.

The Cost of Getting Stock

Procurement is one of the clearest pressure points.

The Competition Commission’s Rural and Township Economy Project identifies constraints in how township and rural businesses source and sell goods, with smaller businesses facing challenges that can prevent them from scaling and integrating more fully into broader value chains.

The issue is partly one of scale.

A small retailer buying limited quantities does not necessarily have the same purchasing power as a larger chain. That can affect the prices it pays, the range of products it can stock and how frequently it can replenish inventory.

The result is a cycle where scale becomes an advantage not only for retailers, but for businesses further up the supply chain as well.

A business that pays more for stock has less room to compete on price. If it cannot reliably obtain popular products, it also risks losing customers to businesses that can.

Distribution Determines What is Available

Price is only one part of the problem.

Stock availability matters just as much.

The dtic has identified stock availability as a key challenge for township businesses, noting that consumers are less likely to return when products are out of stock. The department has also highlighted the need for better supply-chain management and point-of-sale technology to improve the customer experience.

That changes how the distribution problem should be viewed.

A product sitting in a national warehouse does not necessarily help a consumer in a township. It still needs to move through the right wholesale or distribution channel, reach the local business at the right time and be available when the customer wants it.

This final connection can be easy to overlook when supply chains are designed primarily around large formal retailers.

The Route to Market Matters Too

The challenge also works in the other direction.

Many township businesses are heavily dependent on their immediate local customer base, limiting their ability to reach larger markets.

That creates a similar problem for producers and manufacturers. A business may have a product that could sell beyond its immediate area, but reaching those customers requires access to distribution, retail and digital channels that may not be readily available.

The supply chain therefore affects both sides of the market: how businesses get products in and how they get products out.

That is particularly important if South Africa wants township enterprises to become more integrated into broader manufacturing and distribution networks rather than remaining largely localised.

Could Aggregation Help?

One potential way to address the scale problem is through greater purchasing power.

In a recent address to women entrepreneurs, Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Zuko Godlimpi encouraged township businesses to form partnerships and cooperatives so they can buy and sell in greater volumes.

The logic is straightforward. If smaller businesses can aggregate their demand, they may be able to access some of the purchasing advantages normally associated with larger buyers.

Government has already incorporated this principle into support for township community convenience stores. The dtic’s Spaza Shop Support Fund includes support for stock procurement and delivery, while the department has said the programme is intended to strengthen links between spaza shops, local manufacturers, black industrialists and wholesalers through bulk purchasing arrangements.

But aggregation still needs infrastructure behind it.

Someone has to consolidate orders, manage inventory, arrange transport, handle storage and distribute stock. Without those capabilities, simply combining purchasing power will not solve the wider distribution problem.

Closing the Distribution Gap

South Africa has no shortage of entrepreneurial activity in its townships. The challenge is making it easier for those businesses to participate in supply chains that extend beyond their immediate surroundings.

That means looking beyond the individual retailer.

Better wholesale networks, more efficient distribution channels, technology that improves stock visibility and logistics models designed around smaller businesses could all help reduce some of the disadvantages created by limited scale.

It also means recognising that access to a product is not the same as access to a supply chain.

A township retailer may technically be able to buy a product, but if it pays more, receives inconsistent supply or has limited access to alternative suppliers, it is competing from a weaker position.

The 2026 Rural and Township Economy Report makes clear that procurement, stock availability and access to distribution remain important barriers for many smaller businesses.

Closing that gap will therefore require more than encouraging businesses to grow. It will require supply chains that allow them to buy competitively, maintain reliable stock and reach more customers.

For South Africa’s township economy, better distribution could be one of the practical ways to turn local business activity into businesses that can genuinely scale.

By Melinda Ellis van Zyl,enterprise sales lead, Shiprazor

The online retailers who win Q4 are the ones who do the hard work in September. By the time November comes around, it is too late.

Most South African digital retailers lock their systems down weeks before Black Friday. A code freeze means what it says: you stop changing your site and apps so nothing breaks when traffic peaks. With the annual freeze coming up in October, now is the time to review your systems and implement fixes.

Online retail in South Africa grew 35% in 2025 to reach R130-billion, according to the 2026 World Wide Worx Online Retail in South Africa report. It is expected to grow by roughly 22.5% in 2026 to R159-billion by December, the report says.

During Black Friday 2025 online purchases by Standard Bank customers jumped 75% year on year and made up 23% of all customer spend, while Capitec clients’ online purchases surged 43%. Consumers are shopping online more; you need to ask yourself if you’re ready for them.

When you sell online without a dedicated tech or logistics team, you are competing against businesses that have both. A stress-test before the freeze helps close the customer experience gap. Here are three priorities that stand out.

1. Test the Checkout and Payment Flow Under Real Peak-Season Load, Not Average-Day Load

Your checkout is the part most likely to fall over. It may run fine on a slow Wednesday but will it hold up when a few thousand shoppers arrive at once?

Then consider that South Africa’s cart abandonment rate hit as high as 84% in 2025, much of which had nothing to do with people changing their minds. Declined card transactions alone account for roughly 52% of lost online sales, largely due to insufficient funds, expired cards, and bank-side outages that spike exactly when your volumes do.

The solution is to have a rehearsal: pretend it is Black Friday before Black Friday arrives. Place real test orders across every payment method, get several people onto the site at once, and push a batch of orders through to fulfilment. If something breaks, find it now, while you can still fix it and roll back. Once your technology freeze kicks in, it’s too late.

2. Pressure-Test the Courier Network for Redundancy, Not Just Capacity

The pressure doesn’t sit on your code alone. A single-courier setup is a single point of failure, and peak season is when it shows up. One delay, one fuel shortage, one regional gap, and every order behind it stops moving.

The obvious answer is to add couriers, but the catch is that managing them (the separate accounts, rates and tracking screens) creates its own headache when you have the least time for one.

This is where the right software earns its keep. A platform built to route parcels across several couriers carries that complexity for you, sending each order to a partner that can actually deliver it. Spreading volume across couriers from one control point keeps things moving. Set it up and test the handovers before the freeze.

3. Take the Anxiety Out of the Wait

Doubt is an understated factor that can stop a shopper. Will the package arrive as promised? What happens if it turns up damaged? These questions can fuel hesitation long before checkout. The data backs this up: two in three South African shoppers say they wish the brands they bought from kept them better informed.

Beating this doubt starts with communication. A shopper who can watch their order move, stops guessing and is less likely to message support. Automated updates by WhatsApp, SMS or email do this work for you and reassure customers who clicked ‘order’ while feeling skeptical. Pair this automation with an easy returns process and the fear of being stuck with something you don’t want fades away.

Communication and transparency give a Black Friday shopper every reason to return in December.

The Window is Closing

None of this is complicated on its own. What catches merchants out is the sequence. When the freeze happens in October, the testing, the courier audit, and the delivery fixes should all be complete. If you treat shipping as an afterthought, you’re likely to discover its weak points at the worst possible time.

Rigorously test your infrastructure, and your peak season is set to be your strongest quarter of the year. Treat logistics as one connected, end-to-end system rather than a patchwork of couriers and workarounds. This can be the difference between a business that takes the opportunity to scale and one that just survives the season.

Melinda Ellis van Zyl, Enterprise sales lead, Shiprazor

Supply chain leadership has never been a simple job. Leaders are expected to balance cost, efficiency, customer expectations, supplier relationships, technology, people and an increasingly unpredictable global environment.

What has changed is the speed and complexity at which those challenges can emerge.

A disruption that once seemed like an isolated event can quickly affect suppliers, transport networks, inventory levels and customers across an entire operation. At the same time, businesses are under pressure to adopt new technologies, improve efficiency and respond to changing customer expectations.

In this environment, being a good supply chain leader is not only about knowing how a supply chain operates. It is about thinking differently about the challenges facing it.

They Look Beyond the Immediate Problem

Supply chain leaders spend a great deal of time solving problems. A delayed shipment needs attention. A supplier cannot fulfil an order. Inventory is running low. A customer needs an urgent delivery.

These issues cannot simply be ignored, but the strongest leaders do not stop at fixing the immediate problem.

They look at what the problem might be telling them about the wider supply chain.

A recurring delay could point to a weakness in a particular route or supplier relationship. Unexpected fluctuations in demand could reveal weaknesses in forecasting. A stock shortage might expose a lack of flexibility elsewhere in the network.

This means good leadership is not just about asking, “How do we fix this?” It is also about asking, “Why did this happen, and what can we change so that we are better prepared next time?”

That shift in thinking can turn individual problems into opportunities to strengthen the wider operation.

They Are Comfortable With Uncertainty

There will always be things that supply chain leaders cannot control.

Markets change. Costs fluctuate. Customers change their behaviour. Suppliers experience their own challenges. Transport networks can be disrupted by events thousands of kilometres away.

Trying to predict every possible disruption is unrealistic.

Instead, strong leaders think about how prepared the organisation is to respond when something unexpected happens.

This can mean having alternative suppliers, maintaining relationships across a broader network, understanding where the most important dependencies exist or simply ensuring that decision-makers have enough visibility to react quickly.

The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to make the supply chain less vulnerable to it.

They Don’t Chase Technology for Technology’s Sake

Artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, predictive analytics and other technologies are changing the way supply chains operate.

For leaders, however, the question should not simply be which technology to adopt next.

The more important question is what problem the technology is supposed to solve.

Technology can improve visibility, automate repetitive tasks, support forecasting and help businesses make decisions faster. But introducing a new system does not automatically make a supply chain better.

The strongest leaders understand this distinction. They consider how technology fits into the wider operation, whether their teams can effectively use it and whether it is solving a meaningful business problem.

In other words, they start with the supply chain challenge and work backwards towards the technology, rather than starting with the technology and looking for somewhere to use it.

They Understand the Value of Flexibility

Efficiency has traditionally been one of the main goals of supply chain management. Businesses want to reduce costs, minimise waste and make better use of their resources.

Those objectives remain important.

However, a supply chain that is highly efficient under normal conditions may not necessarily perform well when conditions change.

The best leaders therefore think about the balance between efficiency and flexibility.

Sometimes this means accepting a degree of redundancy or maintaining an alternative option that may not appear to be the cheapest choice in the short term. The value comes when circumstances change and that flexibility gives the organisation more options.

This is an important shift in mindset. Instead of viewing resilience as an additional cost, leaders can consider it part of the value of having a supply chain that can adapt.

They See People as Part of the Solution

There is considerable focus on the role of automation and artificial intelligence in the future of supply chains. Yet even the most advanced technology still depends on people.

Someone needs to understand the data. Someone needs to make decisions. Someone needs to manage relationships with suppliers, customers and logistics partners.

Strong supply chain leaders recognise that technology and people are not necessarily competing priorities.

The right technology can remove repetitive work, provide better information and allow employees to focus on more complex decisions. At the same time, organisations need people with the skills to understand and use these new tools effectively.

This makes leadership and skills development increasingly important. The future supply chain may be more digital, but it will still need people who can think critically, adapt quickly and make decisions when the answer is not obvious.

They Think Across the Business

Perhaps one of the biggest differences between traditional and modern supply chain leadership is how leaders view the function itself.

The supply chain does not operate in isolation.

A purchasing decision can affect inventory. An inventory decision can affect cash flow. A logistics decision can affect customer experience. A change in customer demand can have consequences throughout the entire network.

The best leaders understand these connections.

Rather than focusing solely on the performance of their own department, they work with finance, sales, operations, procurement and other parts of the organisation to understand the bigger picture.

This allows supply chain decisions to support broader business objectives rather than being measured purely against operational targets.

They Keep Asking What Comes Next

Perhaps the defining characteristic of a strong supply chain leader is curiosity.

The supply chain environment will continue to change. New technologies will emerge, customer expectations will evolve and new risks will appear.

There is no single strategy that will permanently solve every challenge.

The strongest leaders therefore keep asking questions.

What could change? Where are we vulnerable? What information are we missing? Are we still operating in the way that makes the most sense for the business? What could we do differently?

This mindset creates a supply chain that is not simply built to operate today, but one that can continue evolving tomorrow.

Ultimately, the best supply chain leaders do not have all the answers. What sets them apart is their willingness to question existing assumptions, look beyond immediate problems and create an organisation that is capable of adapting when circumstances change.

In a supply chain environment where change has become a constant, the ability to think differently may be just as important as the ability to execute well.