Djima Antaley delivers a package for Afrety in Dakar, Senegal. Ricci Shryock/Reuters No bank card? No address? No problem. Shoppers in Africa increasingly are buying online from big brands such as Amazon or Walmart even though they have no physical presence on much of the continent. Among those benefiting from the shift are local and…
More than half of online shoppers in sub-Saharan Africa – 56%, the highest share of any region in the world – say they are likely to let AI make shopping decisions or even purchases on their behalf within the next five years, according to the DHL E-Commerce Trends Report 2026, whose South Africa-specific findings were…
Pick n Pay is adding an AI shopping companion called Penny to its asap! app, letting customers build a grocery basket by asking for what they want in their own words — by voice, text or photograph — rather than searching and scrolling through product listings. The feature, built on Google’s Gemini models, goes live…
Sixty60 has launched Pixie, a new AI shopping assistant. Shoprite Group has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature on its Checkers Sixty60 app, aimed at simplifying online grocery shopping by predicting what customers need before they search for it. According to a statement, the feature, called Pixie, acts as a built-in shopping assistant that…
Inkoly | Istock | Getty Images When OpenAI announced its Instant Checkout feature last fall, retailers sprang into action. Etsy, Walmart and Shopify quickly lined up to let users buy merchants’ products directly within its ChatGPT chatbot. Suddenly, the e-commerce world was fixated on shopping agents, the artificial intelligence tools that can make purchases on…
We Need Milk CEO Arjan van den Berg South Africans are shopping for groceries online more than ever, yet many households still struggle to see the full cost and nutritional value of their baskets before checkout. A new service called We Need Milk thinks it has the solution. Online retail exceeded R130-billion in 2025 and…
The VCA Retail Spend Monitor analyses retail sales activity over a seven-week period beginning on 1 November 2025. South African consumers significantly increased their online shopping during the 2025/26 holiday season, with e-commerce spending jumping 49.9% year on year, according to Visa’s latest Retail Spend Monitor. The annual report compiled by Visa Consulting and Analytics…
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Online retail now makes up nearly 10% of total retail sales in South Africa, and World Wide Worx has forecast the figure will breach that mark for the first time ever in January 2026. Online retail sales as a proportion of total retail revenue grew to 8% in the 2024 calendar year and is on…
South African retail chain Checkers, owned by the Shoprite Group, is trailing new “smart” shopping trolleys that let customers scan items and pay for their groceries directly from the cart. The Checkers Xpress Trolley, developed by the group’s innovation department, ShopriteX, is being tested at two stores in the Western Cape. Read: Checkers pilots new…
