A hefty delivery fee can put us off an online purchase, especially when we’re only buying one inexpensive item. Shops know this, and keeping that fee low often means paying some of the delivery cost themselves. With diesel prices rising, that’s getting harder to afford.
The September fuel adjustment added roughly R2.94 a litre to wholesale 500ppm diesel and R3.15 to 50ppm diesel. Projections for October suggest another increase of around R3 a litre could follow on 7 October, although the final adjustment hasn’t been confirmed. Merchants will have to check how their couriers apply fuel surcharges to know what that means for their own bills.
Sahil Affriya, founder and CEO of multi-courier logistics platform Shiprazor, says some of the expense is already there, hidden behind an attractive booking price. “A merchant may focus on saving a few rand on the courier quote while losing far more through a second delivery attempt, a return, the wrong service level or packaging that pushes the parcel into a higher charge band,” he says.
Paying to send the same parcel again
It’s easy to compare two courier quotes and choose the cheaper one. It takes more work to establish whether that courier is still cheaper after failed deliveries and returns, which is what Affriya wants merchants to check. He recommends adding up their logistics spend and dividing it by the number of orders that reached customers and weren’t returned.
That calculation includes the orders a shop paid to send but didn’t get to keep as sales. An incorrect address can mean paying for another trip, while a delivery that doesn’t arrive also leaves someone at the shop dealing with the customer’s query. Even the box can add to the expense if it’s large enough to push a small, light item into a higher charge band.
The same courier also won’t necessarily be the best choice for every address. Affriya recommends comparing services for each delivery, including whether a provider handles a particular route reliably. There’s little benefit in saving a few rand on a booking if the customer then has to chase their parcel and the shop has to pay to send it again.
How much will customers pay?
We’re shopping in a market where big retailers have made low-cost delivery part of their offer. Amazon’s move into everyday essentials in South Africa, for example, included free delivery on eligible products. Smaller shops still have to pay to get their orders to us, even when we’ve become accustomed to seeing little or no delivery charge at checkout.
The 2026 Online Retail in South Africa report forecasts online sales of about R159 billion this year, up 22.5% from R130 billion in 2025. But shipping fees remain a problem: 51.7% of retailers surveyed identified them as a reason for abandoned carts. The finding reflects retailers’ responses, rather than measuring how many shoppers left because delivery was too expensive.
Affriya suggests offering a slower, cheaper delivery option for customers who don’t need their orders urgently, or adjusting the amount they have to spend to qualify for free delivery. Those are options worth testing against actual sales. Asking someone to spend more to qualify won’t help much if they only wanted one item and decide to buy it elsewhere.
He also recommends calculating what another R5 or R10 per order would do to the business before changing its shipping fees. Across 1,000 orders, that’s an extra R5,000 or R10,000 to pay. A shop needs to know how much profit those orders leave it with, and how much it’s spending on deliveries that go wrong, before deciding what it can afford to cover for customers.