Bringing online shopping to South Africa’s townships

Bob Group managing director Andy Higgins believes smart lockers can help increase e-commerce adoption by making it accessible to more people.

Not everyone can be home to receive deliveries, lives at an address couriers can deliver to, or works from an office they can send parcels to.

“Where we’re still lacking for e-commerce to truly become accessible to all South Africans is to provide a viable solution to those in the more outlying or informal areas,” Higgins told MyBroadband in a recent interview.

For this reason, Bob Group is testing a smart locker service — Bob Box.

“I really think that this can have a significant impact, especially in the informal areas where you going to be able to have your parcel delivered to a locker or pickup point rather than to a physical address,” Higgins said.

He said they conducted rigorous research before tackling the project and found that lockers helped drive e-commerce adoption in Europe and Asia.

“We delved deep into the success of Poland, a prominent leader in the courier, express, and parcel services industry,” Higgins said.

“I believe that’s going to be the same for South Africa.”

Bob Box’s lockers are locally designed and manufactured, which Higgins said allows them to customise them for operating in South Africa. It’s also much cheaper than importing them.

“Why should South Africa, a net exporter of steel, export steel to China only to have it shipped back after it has been bent and moulded into the desired shape?” he said.

One of their requirements was that the lockers could not rely on external power due to load-shedding.

This resulted in them choosing Vodacom’s narrowband Internet of Things network (NB-IoT) for connectivity.

“We needed a solution that is low power consumption, and secondary to that, also has coverage in the areas where we will place them,” Higgins said.

This includes deep inside malls or in basements underground.

“So we needed to ensure that we could have network coverage at those points, and it seems — although we’re still early in the process of developing this — NB-IoT ticked those boxes for us.”

Bob Box currently has 12 locker locations in Gauteng and aims to reach 150 locker locations nationwide by the end of 2024.

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