Working at Stuff means spending a surprising amount of time bumping around various online stores. It’s not enough to know what tech is new and hot, we also have to know a) where it is and b) how much it costs. One of the stores we’ve recently spent more time on is Bash, though we were never wholly ignorant of it.
Stuff was most familiar with the platform in its guise of Hi Online. That has since been folded into Bash, an omnibus online store for The Foschini Group’s (TFG) collection of retail outlets. Think of it a bit like Takealot but with a curated range of products. Basically, if you can find it on the shop floor(s), you’ll find it in the online store.
The concept will probably catch on with companies that have multiple stores under their umbrellas. Combine the stock into a single online store and use the existing infrastructure to combine stock and send deliveries. The main question is: what is it like to use a system like this? The answer? Not bad, even if you’re intentionally trying to mess with the multi-store system.
Bashing it out
The Bash online store, as an entity, is fairly simple to navigate. If you ever used its predecessor, Hi Online, you’ll know exactly what to expect in terms of usability. The website itself is built around a standard e-commerce template, the kind Stuff sees loads of when sourcing items from overseas — particularly the UK. Product pages are simple and easy to understand, shipping and return policies are easy to find, and it’s easy enough to load products from various different stores into a single cart and order them from various stores at once. Which is precisely what we did.
It’s not immediately obvious that you’re ordering from various stores. It might as well all be in the same warehouse, for all those purchasing on the platform know. That info is only revealed once the order is placed and each item’s point of origin is cleared up. It is possible, by selecting the menu in the upper left, to confine your money-spending activities to a single store — American Swiss, Sportscene, or Foschini, for example — but that wasn’t what we did.
From order to door
Our order was split between several different TFG stores — specifically, TotalSports, @home, and Hi Online. For those playing the home game, that’s sporting gear, kitchen and appliances, and tech. The order also consisted of a range of different weights and sizes, with the heaviest item weighing in at just over 20kg. The lightest? A few grams.
The point of this product variety was twofold. First, to mess with the courier system a little bit. And second, because we needed them. The reason they were required will turn up in a separate article. This is all about the process, as the most pretentious actors love to say. Getting the products into a cart and signing up for an account was as simple as a series of clicks. Account setup on the Bash website was even simpler, with an option to use Gmail credentials eliminating the need for filling in forms.
Which just left payment and delivery. This was also purposely done in as inconvenient a manner as possible. Payment was made on a Thursday evening, free shipping was selected, and the delivery date was set for the following Thursday (see the bit above about multiple stores being involved). That works out to four business days since we decided to be irritating.
Despite this, the package was split in two, with the first arriving early on the following Monday (two business days, technically). The remainder, which included the 20-kilo item, turned up the next day (three business days). Two different couriers were used — OnTheDot delivered the first, lighter-but-bulkier package and RAM brought through the heavyweight stuff.
In terms of delivery performance, our experience with the Bash online store was at least comparable to more visible services like Takealot. But, again, without the benefit of having everything in the same warehouse. We know this because the RAM waybill listed the entire process, right down to which retail store we could have walked into to get the items ourselves. But who goes to retail stores anymore, right?