South Africa's e-commerce market is at an inflection point. Takealot has dominated for over a decade, and Amazon, live locally since May 2024, is still a fraction of its size. But behind Amazon sits a global giant with worldwide logistics and advertising infrastructure and a patient, well-tested habit of chipping away at incumbents.
On an episode of MerchantSpring Marketplace Masters, Maon Seidel, founder and CEO of the South African agency eCommerce Counsel, made a pointed argument: for enterprise brands, this is no longer a wait-and-see market, and the thing that separates the winners is not better ads. It is operational discipline.
Takealot is a serious business. For the year ended March 2026, the group grew revenue about 18% to roughly $1 billion, with gross merchandise value around $2 billion and 6.2 million active customers on the core Takealot.com platform, and it turned its first annual operating profit since launching in 2011 (TechCentral). It is backed by Naspers, one of the largest technology investors in the world. Amazon does not disclose local figures, but Seidel estimates it sits near 1.5 million users at its two-year mark, which puts Takealot's customer base at roughly three times the size.
Two things make the trajectory more interesting than that gap suggests. First, South Africa's online share of retail is still only around 10%, low by developed-market standards and growing fast as connectivity reaches more of the population, which arguably makes it one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets anywhere. Second, Seidel points out that South Africa is effectively Amazon's African launchpad; the group has deep local roots (Amazon Web Services traces its origins to a Cape Town engineering team), even if the next big marketplace target on the continent is more likely to be Nigeria than a slow regional rollout.
Takealot and Amazon South Africa are not interchangeable, and treating them as one channel is a mistake. Takealot is the mature option: an established promotional calendar, a loyal local base, and a buying-team culture that rewards relationship management, which is where most enterprise brands have built their pure-play presence. Amazon brings global infrastructure, a vendor model with specific content and operational standards, and far more advertising sophistication, some of it already live locally and the rest coming soon. The brands winning on both run channel-specific strategies with dedicated budgets.
The distinction Seidel draws is about time horizon. Takealot delivers more of the “right now” revenue, but applying a right-now mindset to Amazon is a mistake. His favourite line captures it: ask any brand selling on Amazon in the US, Germany, the UK or Australia what they would do differently, and the answer is always “I wish I'd started sooner,” because playing catch-up later is expensive and avoidable. The opportunity today is to build the asset, the reviews, the ranked listings, the share of voice, while entry is still cheap, rather than paying a premium to acquire it once the market matures.
Here is the insight most likely to change how a brand spends its next quarter. When revenue is flat, brands assume it is a content or advertising problem and pour money into creative or ad spend. Nine times out of ten, Seidel says, the real issue is upstream: stock availability, forecasting misalignment between the brand team and the marketplace, or purchase orders sitting unprocessed because nobody internally owns them.
He describes a client that ranked well and whose ads performed, yet sales stayed flat; the cause was a fulfilment disconnect, with inventory simply not flowing through. Fixing that operational layer, and nothing else, lifted sell-through within six to eight weeks. Until the plumbing underneath the marketing is fixed, he says, spending on ads is pushing water uphill.
This is also why he treats Amazon's standards as the benchmark for everything. If you set a catalogue up to be compliant with Amazon's stricter content and operational policies, you are set up for every other platform too; Amazon is the northern star.
When South African clients balk at six images, video, proper A-plus content and a full brand store, the answer is to show them where success is actually happening, because the leading listings are, almost without exception, simply set up correctly and efficiently. It is an investment that pays back across every channel they sell on.
Ask why the operational layer breaks, and Seidel's answer is organisational. In a large corporate, the e-commerce channel touches brand managers, the category team, logistics, finance and the sales director, each with different priorities and reporting lines, and very rarely is there one person owning it end to end.
So a good agency's job becomes as much internal coordination as platform execution: translating between what Amazon needs operationally and what the brand can actually deliver. That bridge, more than any campaign, decides whether the channel grows or stalls.
The fix starts at the top with executive sponsorship and a single, genuine point of accountability on the brand side, someone who owns the channel rather than carrying it as a side duty. Those owners also set realistic expectations, because marketplace growth is not instant; it demands catalogue investment, operational discipline and an honest horizon for compounding results.
Seidel encourages clients to work in 90-day cycles: what are we fixing this quarter, what are we building for next, and warns that brands treating marketplaces as a purely promotional channel, or handing the whole thing to the most junior rep alongside every other emerging channel, tend to plateau.
Agencies still have to change the tyres while driving the car, so quick wins matter for building trust. If a brand simply wants revenue this quarter and is chasing ROI, Seidel says Takealot is usually the better place to spend, given its far larger base, though never in isolation. The durable short-term wins are unglamorous: a clean catalogue, correct pricing, at least a few strong images, proper A-plus content on every listing, and a brand store.
On the vendor side, it is about a genuine relationship with the buyer, worth considering Amazon's paid Vendor Services, and an ongoing conversation with the people who influence the buying decisions. And it means watching the channel daily and weekly, not monthly, because opportunities and crises both surface fast.
Seidel frames the Amazon relationship in a way worth internalising: in this market, Amazon is effectively a client too. Its buying teams carry KPIs for category growth and sales, and they cannot hit them without the products your brand supplies, so they will push hard to make sure you can deliver stock. Make your Amazon counterparts look good internally, and much of the job takes care of itself, which, as host Paul Sonneveld noted, holds true well beyond South Africa.
For international brands, much of the groundwork already exists; the big global names from Nike to Coca-Cola are long present in the market. Seidel's team works with Pernod Ricard, owner of Jameson and other well-known spirits brands, and had to purpose-build for South Africa because alcohol volumes, bottle sizes and local collaborations differ. But for a brand already running well in the US, UK, Germany or Australia, extending into South Africa is, in his words, simple, though not easy.
The practical question is fulfilment: use a local 3PL, which he recommends, or ship directly into Amazon and Takealot if volumes justify it. A strategic bonus follows: proven pure-play traction makes the conversation with South Africa's large brick-and-mortar chains much easier, in a market where physical retail access is broad and in places exceeds online access. For brands weighing the wider move, MerchantSpring's guide on how to sell on Amazon internationally and its global marketplace expansion guide cover the cross-border mechanics.
Which platform first depends on the horizon. For a three-to-five-year view, Seidel weighs heavily toward Amazon, expecting it to match the success it has had almost everywhere else. For immediate returns, you cannot ignore Takealot and its larger base. His pragmatic sequence for a proven international catalogue: register on Takealot to enter the market, while building the setup and infrastructure on Amazon in parallel.
And the most expensive fix-it-later mistake, he warns, is not a listing detail but strategy and cash flow. Inventory must be available all the time, which means the access to working capital has to match the strategy from the start. Get that wrong, and you can be careful what you wish for: selling so well you cannot supply.
Seidel's point is that flat revenue usually hides an operational problem, not a marketing one, and you can only see it if your marketplace performance and profitability sit in one place. MerchantSpring gives brands and agencies a single view across their Amazon accounts and marketplaces, surfacing the stock, sell-through and profitability signals that tell you whether to fix the plumbing or spend on ads. See it on your own accounts with a walkthrough of your data.