AFRICAN SPEAKER BUREAU | CURATED FOR THE COURIER GUY
Delivery Is Where Retail Keeps Its Promise
Five independent voices who have carried the cost of delivery themselves, curated for The Courier Guy's three Deliver Room workshops at Converge Retail Tech Johannesburg on 10 November 2026.
Retailers choose couriers on price. In a 2026 survey of South African online retailers, 92 per cent said a lower delivery cost would make them switch provider. The same retailers named shipping fees as the second reason shoppers abandon their carts, after declined cards. Delivery costs a retailer the sale before the parcel ever moves. Seventy-nine per cent of South African adults have internet access, yet only 34 per cent shop online, and that share fell from 36.6 per cent while total spending grew. Delivery fees, minimum order values and unreliable service outside the cities keep millions of connected South Africans out of ecommerce. These numbers make delivery a commercial lever for every retailer at Converge. The voices on this page make that case from their own experience, in three working sessions designed to send delegates home with decisions they will act on.
About this collection
A customer judges a retailer when the parcel arrives, and again if it has to go back. South African online retail reached about R130 billion in 2025 and is forecast at R159 billion in 2026, close to one rand in every ten spent in retail. At that scale, delivery has become part of the retail offer itself. It decides whether a shopper completes the purchase, whether they trust the return, whether they buy again, and how many South Africans ecommerce reaches at all. Retailers at this stage carry a real tension: - Finance asks for a lower cost per parcel. - Customers judge the brand on speed, choice, reliability, tracking and the ease of a return. Both pressures are legitimate, and price per parcel measures only one of them. Leadership teams that manage delivery well put a fuller set of numbers in front of the decision: - conversion at checkout; - first-attempt success and redelivery; - contact centre volume; - return time; - repeat purchase. The strongest case for that fuller view comes from people who have carried the cost themselves. This group includes a founder who grew a direct-to-consumer brand to seventy thousand units a month, an operator who has led national port, rail and passenger systems, and a specialist who has repaired failures that organisations blamed on their frontline staff. None of them sells delivery. Converge Retail Tech Johannesburg runs on 10 November 2026 at the NH Hotel Sandton as a day of working sessions, each sixty minutes long, with twenty to forty delegates, built for discussion and decisions. The three Deliver Room workshops follow one line of argument. - The morning session covers the sale and the checkout. - The midday session asks who owns the customer once the order is placed. - The afternoon session treats the delivery network as infrastructure to lead and to measure. A logistics moderator carries the argument through all three, and an emerging voice offers an additional option for the morning.
Explore this curated collection and contact African Speakers Bureau for speaker recommendations and availability.