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Given its size and dominance in South Africa’s online space, it’s easy to draw comparisons between Takealot and Amazon.

As both websites continue to grow, there has been increasing cross-over in their offerings with Takealot also offering open-box deals and goods from third-party sellers.

However, arguably Amazon’s stand-out service is its Amazon Prime subscription service.

For $10 a month, Prime subscribers receive a number of perks including free ebooks, music and video streaming.

Its biggest selling point however is free delivery of over 50 million items within two days or less.

Speaking to BusinessTech, Takealot CEO Kim Reid said that Takealot would likely include a “Amazon Prime-like” service at some point in the future, but was currently unable to find a financial model that would make it viable in South Africa.

“We really have been actively looking at Prime but have not been able to find a model,” said Reid. “A service like Prime increases the frequency of purchases, but drops your average order value (AOV).

“The higher the AOV, the more you can do – including reinvesting back into the system, but when your AOV is lower it also all of a sudden makes delivery much more difficult.

“We will roll something out, I just can’t say for certain what exactly it will look like when we do,” he said.

Reinvesting back into the site

Two things which will not be making their way over from Amazon anytime soon are fresh groceries and certain digital/streaming services.

Reid explained that e-books (which are offered as part of Amazon’s Kindle) had seen a drastic decline in popularity on Takealot, while he felt that the company could not offer anything new in the streaming arena which is growing increasingly expensive to enter.

Instead, Takealot’s primary focus was to get into basic profitability so that it can use this money for reinvestment.

Specifically some of the biggest changes will be made to the site directly, said Reid.

“This includes encouraging more sellers onto the platform, offering more options to customers and finding more convenient ways to deliver products.

“We will also focus around marketplace looking at brands such as Superbalist, improving customer discovery (inlcuding improved search functionality), and plan to add automatic pricing so that we can quickly address low prices and not miss out due to arbitrage.”

Reid also said that the site’s look and basic functionality will see changes, including a number of improvements to the left-hand navigation bar.

New developments

While Takealot will continue to improve to its platform, Reid did indicate that the group was currently working on two other areas.

The first of these will be the introduction of “white goods” (large electronics) – including major appliances such as dishwashers and washing machines.

He said that Takealot was also looking at other furniture offerings following the success of its Simba “bed in a box”, which had seen over a 100 orders in the week leading up to Black Friday alone.

The second new development being considered by Takealot is the option to offer pick-up collection services.

Currently, Takealot customers can only pick up orders from the website’s Cape Town warehouse, but Reid said that Takealot was looking at which of its distribution centres around the country could facilitate also being a pick-up point.

This he hopes will benefit both Takealot and its customers, as rescheduling orders remained one of the most difficult parts of the delivery process, he said.

Makes you wonder if this was the plan from the start, I can’t imagine them making a profit on the original model so I guess they opted to bleed out the value over time.

It isn't what it has been, for sure. We were OK with the price going up "because of Amazon Prime Video" because we don't have cable/satellite TV, so there were a lot of old shows we enjoyed. So that was OK.

But with the products it used to be easy to justify the membership, now we're more in the "we need to buy something to use our membership" category, and that kinda defeats the whole purpose.

Meanwhile, "a funny thing" happened on the video front: More and more of the old shows we used to get for free have suddenly become "for pay." And that is becoming really annoying... you get a few seasons into something, and suddenly a paywall pops up. That's UN-cool!

=^..^=

very intresting. Thank you

I think Amazon is more powerful than some states, in this kind of world Facebook, Google and Amazon are very important and I'm sure that they will have a huge power

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@ipromote dear how are you? Some days ago I buy upvote with you, brother but you give me this gift

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Please brother help me & remove this list? O request

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Better use overstock.com and pay in crypto   : )

Please read and share 🙏🏾

To the downvoting racist old and young farmers You are a scammer a thief a criminal who is working for other criminals

⭕⭕⭕⭕⭕⭕👀

Hello everyone I hope you are all good and well today in this post is some of the evidence to prove my case

If you didn't know I've been getting downvoted for a long time on Hive

They have been trying to bully me with downvotes and words but it doesn't affect me I've been online for over 25 years

So I've dealt with people like this before it's nothing new

But what they are doing is bad Very badi joined steemit like everyone else thinking it offers freedom but I must say steemit offered much more freedom than Hive does

Everyone already knows I only post my own original content I have no need to steal anything from anyone

I've been labelled a lot of things on Hive 😂 by the biggest farmers scammers and downvoters

Actions speak louder than any words do especially when them words are coming from a compolsive liars

I will keep updating this post when I get time

https://hive.blog/hive/@ureka.stats/the-untrending-report-hive-downvote-analysis-16-09-2025-20250916181314

https://hive.blog/hivedev/@makerhacks/please-peakd-allow-me-to-completely-block-spammers-would-you-ever-vote-for-this

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https://hive.blog/hive/@ureka.stats/the-untrending-report-hive-downvote-analysis-29-09-2025-20250929172045

No downvotes for this racist person 🧐

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Truth hurts doesn't it @hurtlocker 😂😂😂

💯 Original Content and comments downvoted for no reason Please read and view

@steevc please tell your friends to stop downvoting my original content please 🙏🏾

Blocktrades Aka @themarkymark Aka @buildawhale @punkteam @usainvote @gogreenbuddy @letsusbuyhive please stop downvoting my original content I'm not going to reply to your abusive comments as that is what you enjoy doing seems like you have a lot of free time

Please explain why you keep downvoting my original content 🤔 if you aren't blocktrades then why doesn't do something 😂 also why would you be sending all that Hive with buildawhale to alpha an account that is blocktrades wife 😂😂😂

@crimsonclad please do your job 🙏🏾

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It's unbelievable that they downvoted this Goodbye Auntie R.I.P 🙏🏾

Comments being downvoted by blocktrades https://hive.blog/hive-170744/@kgakakillerg/t0ns3b

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Stop farming Hive https://hive.blog/burnpost/@buildawhale/re-1756307402814502169-20250827t151240z

😂😂😂😂😂

📊 The Untrending Report - Hive Downvote Analysis - 2025-09-07

RE: Understanding Pointers in C Programming

Please Peakd, allow me to completely block spammers (Would you ever vote for this?) thanks for exposing yourself more @makerhacks

Please go through it all instead of calling it spam 😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣