Mr. Wu, the owner of a Takealot store in South Africa, was recently shocked by a statistic: his store’s overall return rate was 7.51 TP3T. He had previously focused only on sales and advertising and had never paid attention to the return rate—as a result, his store nearly got shut down. Running a business on the South African marketplace is no longer as simple as listing products and waiting for orders to come in.

Take Mr. Wu, the owner of a Takealot store in South Africa: he opened his store, ran ads, spent money, but didn’t get any traffic, and his conversion rates wouldn’t go up. He used to think that “listing a product would automatically generate orders,” but he discovered that the game had long since changed on the South African site.

Mr. Wu, who runs a business on South Africa’s Takealot, wanted to switch from direct shipping to the official warehouse to speed up delivery, but he didn’t realize that warehousing required labeling and inspection—as a result, his first shipment was returned in its entirety because the barcodes were incorrect. He had previously only calculated the commission fees and hadn’t considered the details of warehousing and fulfillment.

I previously wrote about a business owner named Zhang who turned his business around by switching to a local warehouse. After reading it, one seller commented: ”That’s someone else’s story. I’m also doing direct shipping, and I’m losing money big time.” […]

There is no such thing as absolutely good or bad—only whether something is suitable or not. Mercado Libre is projected to reach $65 billion in GMV by 2025, covering 18 Latin American countries; Takeal […]