Bob Group, the e-commerce solutions platform formed through the merger of Bidorbuy and uAfrica, has built its own smart locker solution for parcel deliveries call Bob Box – and it plans to roll them out across South Africa.
Speaking in an interview on the TechCentral Show, which will be published this week, Bob Group MD Andy Higgins said: “We have embarked on a process over the past two years of building our own solution, designing the hardware and firmware locally and having the physical lockers manufactured locally as well, through a partner.”
He said the decision by Bob Group to build its own smart locker solution locally instead of importing an off-the-shelf alternative from an international service provider has given Bob Group more control over the product, which has led to South African-specific customisations.
“We’ve made it South Africa-proof. It does not rely on an external power supply, it runs off a battery and we are using … narrowband IoT – we’ve partnered with Vodacom on that. NB IoT is a new, low-power, low-bandwidth technology that allows us to have real-time updates with our lockers,” said Higgins.
Bob Box is the first hardware project that Higgins and his team have undertaken and has led to “fun and interesting challenges”. Hardware projects tend to have longer iteration cycles, he said.
Bob Group sees smart lockers playing a pivotal role in the growth of e-commerce in South Africa, especially given the “last mile” fulfilment challenges faced by logistics companies in townships and outlying areas.
But Higgins said there is big potential for smart lockers in urban areas, too. In Poland, smart lockers account for about 80% of all e-commerce deliveries, he said.
Thousand locations
“We have 70 live locations in Gauteng and Cape Town. Our target is to reach a thousand locations by the end of next year, and we believe we can do it because our solution is now stable and, with local manufacturing, we can roll out quite quickly,” he said.
Bob Box smart lockers are typically located on petrol station forecourts, at shopping malls and in residential estates.
He said the margins in smart lockers are thin, meaning the business requires scale to be profitable. Bob Group aims to achieve scale by opening its solution to consumers through an app to be launched later this year. Using the app, users will be able to book the shipment of parcels from between two points using the lockers as a collection point.
Another way Bob Group is keeping its smart solution open to the market is by using a “courier-agnostic” approach, where many different couriers can use its network of lockers and counters to fulfil their deliveries.
“It doesn’t make sense for 10 different courier companies to have their own locker outside a residential estate. We want to provide that infrastructure and then enable any other courier who wants to tap into that to be able to use it. That’s also how we hope to get to the scale we need to make it work financially,” said Higgins.
He said there is a lot of scope for growth in South Africa’s e-commerce market, especially considering that in most emerging markets, e-commerce has already surpassed the 10% mark as a proportion of total retail sales, whereas South Africa it is only around 5-6%.
“People are finally realising the benefits of shopping online. I personally believe we are going to get the real breakthrough in e-commerce in this country when we can make e-commerce accessible to the entire population,” Higgins said. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media
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