Retailer Makro has acquired a majority stake in WumDrop, the on-demand delivery service that was a Stuff App Award winner in 2015. Neither party has disclosed the value of the deal. Makro says the acquisition will reduce delivery time for items ordered online by customers living within 20km of a Makro store from three days to three hours.

WumDrop was founded in Cape Town in 2014 by Simon Hartley and Roy Borole. Borole later left the business to pursue other interests in the tech sector. The service is available in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Pretoria and it’s customers include The Foschini Group, Standard Bank, and Zando, all of which it’ll continue to serve despite the Makro acquisition.

Makro has already been using WumDrop for 16 of its outlets in the cities in which the service operates, and says the average turnaround time from order to delivery has been under two-and-a-half hours.

Initially consumer focused, WumDrop has added various business-orientated service options in recent years, including on-demand, after-hours, and same-day delivery options that it offers at discounted rates to businesses.

The service has also proved itself far more flexible than traditional courier businesses. It gladly delivers to coffee shops (we tried that one ourselves once), restaurants or similar, and WumDrop drivers take a picture of the item in the hands of the intended recipient using a smartphone or tablet that’s then sent to the item sender to prove it arrived where it was meant to.

“WumDrop just works,” says Dean Bauer, Makro’s supply chain director. “Their tech is extremely flexible and solid, allowing integration with any retailer big or small, and after extensive testing it was apparent to us that their solution provided the kind of transparency, speed and flexibility for our customers that we just couldn’t say no to.”