Online shopping in South Africa is now worth about a tenth of what the country's retailers sell. Online Retail in South Africa 2026, published by World Wide Worx with Mastercard, Peach Payments and Ask Africa, applies three different measures to that milestone, because the available retail series answer different questions. On the constant-price convention its earlier editions used, online was about 10.7% of retail in 2025. On a strict comparison of online turnover against Stats SA retail sales at current prices, the crossing happened in the first half of this year and the full-year average lands at 10%.
The money is less ambiguous. South Africans are expected to spend about R159 billion online in 2026, growth the study estimates at 22.5%. That adds roughly R29 billion of turnover in a single year, almost the size of the entire South African online market in 2020. Retail as a whole grew about 4% over the first five months of the year.
What a subscription is actually buying
A delivery subscription is not really about delivery. Amazon Prime costs R59 a month here and Shoprite's Xtra Savings Plus R99, and the report is explicit that plans like these exist to lift how often people shop and how many categories they buy across, not to absorb the courier bill. TakealotMORE carried more than a quarter of Takealot Group's sales within two years of launching.
The growth those plans feed is not evenly spread. Checkers Sixty60 sold R25.5 billion of groceries in the year to June, a third of what Pick n Pay takes in a full year. TFG's Bash grew 49.2% and produced the turnover of 195 physical stores, which is why the group can keep closing branches without losing the sales.
Fifteen years to a profit
Takealot Group recorded its first full-year trading profit about fifteen years after it launched, R171 million on an adjusted basis. Two years before that it wrote R5.9 billion off the value of its e-commerce business, on the view that it was taking too long to get there. The report is careful about what the profit means at this scale: a margin of about 1% is thin cover against Amazon, which started selling Prime here in June for less than its video service costs on its own.
The shopper base is the part that is not growing. The share of adults buying online fell from 36% in 2024 to 34.2% in 2025, so the extra turnover is coming from people who were already there, ordering more often. Ask Africa's Andrea Rademeyer said convenience has overtaken saving money as the reason people shop online, and that established shoppers are buying more frequently and across more categories.
Arthur Goldstuck, who led the research, points out that online retail has gone from under 1% of turnover to a tenth of the market in a decade. The next tenth has to come from people who are not shopping online yet, and the past two years have gone the other way.
