Takealot extending Black Friday deals by one more day
Takealot’s extended downtime during Black Friday was caused by a massive spike in traffic, according to CEO Kim Reid, speaking to 702’s Kieno Kammies on Friday.
Reid said that Takealot’s Black Friday deals would continue into next week as the site still struggles to remain online.
“The nice thing about this is that we have five days in any event so we will extend into Wednesday next week and anything that has not been sold out so far will be extended into new deals,” he said.
“We had a heck of a spike in traffic as we opened up at one minute past twelve this morning. We saw quite a number of transactions coming through. In fact, the transaction volume we had over the first hour has been larger than the first six to seven hours we had last year,” said Reid.
The CEO said that Takealot’s priority was to get the site up and running and to make sure that the 25 million transactions processed so far are dropping into its warehouses and being shipped.
“As we speak, we are gradually bringing the site up again and you know we should be up and running relatively soon,” said Reid.
“There is a lot of anger sometimes with our customers who can’t get to deals. We’re terribly sorry about that, but it is a first come first serve type of platform and if you manage to get in and take it then you’ve got that, there’s not much we can do about that.”
Additional reporting by News24.
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