Just a few days to go until Black Friday, the start of the festive shopping season, and retailers are readying themselves for the busiest shopping day of the year. Menlyn Park Shopping Centre is reopening the day before, offering extended shopping hours, extra security and a park-and-ride service, expecting at least 100,000 customers on the day. While e-commerce sites prepare for a surge in web traffic. Justin Drennan, co-founder and CEO of Parcelninja, says online retail in South Africa is set for a boom in the coming months, particularly this quarter, adds Thomas Pays, co-founder and CEO of i-Pay, in a release sent to Bizcommunity. Julie-Ann Walsh, CMO of Takealot, says that for the online retailer, last year's sale showed growth of more than 200%. Sven Hammer, co-founder and CEO of Apica, explains how to avoid downtime over the holidays, and Kevin Tucker, CEO of PriceCheck, teams up with Drennan to provide some key insights retailers should be thinking about, in their areas of expertise - that is negotiating deals with suppliers and ensuring delivery logistics run smoothly. In terms of deliveries and returns, Robyn Cooke, head of e-commerce at TFG (The Foschini Group), looks at applying innovative options used abroad to the South African context. "It is essential that we adapt global standards of best practice to suit the South African market and socio-economic conditions... Globally deliveries and returns are optimised around customer convenience and preference and I see no reason why the same can't transform the South African environment. Online shopping should be moulded to suit customers' lives, not the other way around." Some food for thought... All the best for the final preparations.

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