In 2023, Shoprite Group’s Checkers became the first South African grocer to charge shoppers a monthly fee, launching Xtra Savings Plus at R99. Many of its rivals have since followed.
Pick n Pay launched Smart Shopper Pro last week at the same price, offering free asap! deliveries on orders over R350, triple points on fresh food and 10% off an in-store shop. TakealotMore costs R39 or R99, for standard or premium. Amazon Prime, which was launched in June, costs R59 a month and includes Prime Video, which Amazon used to sell on its own for R79.
South African retail is being Prime-ified.
In other markets, Amazon has proved over two decades that a subscription doesn’t have to make money on delivery if it changes how customers behave. Members shop more often, concentrate their spending with one retailer and leave a clean record of what their household buys. Naspers-owned Takealot says its members already account for a quarter of everything it sells.
The fee also separates the customers a retailer cares most about from everyone else. When Checkers launched Pixie, its AI shopping assistant, it was at first available only to paying members. Pick n Pay calls Smart Shopper Pro’s R99 its launch price, which suggests it is still testing what its best customers will bear. It is also one of the retailers inside TakealotMore, a sign of how unsettled this market is.
Sixty60 turned over a staggering R25.5bn in the year to June 2026, up 34.5%, and now accounts for about one-tenth of Shoprite’s South African supermarket sales. Pick n Pay’s online sales grew 35.4% in its latest half, though it doesn’t say how big the business is.
Dis-Chem has taken a different route, and its financial results last week showed the cost. Its Better Rewards programme is free to join. Instead of charging members, it leans on suppliers: 200 brands take part, under what Dis-Chem calls sustainable funding agreements, and members now account for 86.1% of sales. The next step, it says, is “predictive and adaptive offers” from its in-house technology unit, X, bigly labs. In practice, that means deals tailored to each shopper.
Dis-Chem doubled its spending on X, bigly labs in the six months to August, and headline earnings per share fell 12.8%. It has spent R240m rebuilding its digital platform, yet the first version of its new app is still not commercially launched — it should be rolled out widely early next year. Shareholders, who sent the shares tumbling almost 13% on Friday after taking fright at the increased capital spending and its impact on earnings, are paying now for returns promised later.
Amazon Prime is aggressively priced and increasingly world class, with same-day delivery in Joburg, Pretoria and Cape Town on orders placed before midday. In the US, Amazon Pharmacy is extending same-day prescription delivery to about 4,500 cities and towns this year, and Prime members can add RxPass, a $5 a month prescription subscription.
Pharmacy is the obvious next category for South African retailers, yet none has pursued on-demand delivery of medicine particularly aggressively.
That’s surprising, because the pharmacy chains already have what e-commerce rewards: dense store networks, trusted brands and customers who buy often and predictably. Clicks has more than 700 pharmacies; Dis-Chem more than 320.
Clicks began piloting on-demand delivery of over-the-counter medicine in May and delivers repeat prescriptions free within four hours. Dis-Chem launched a 60-minute delivery of front-shop products in 2021. Shoprite CEO Pieter Engelbrecht said last year that “pharmaceuticals are next” for Sixty60, and its Medirite Plus pharmacies are now on the app.
But none yet delivers a new prescription within the hour as part of a membership, the way Sixty60 delivers groceries.
Regulation is one reason. A pharmacist has to confirm that the patient is entitled to the medicine and has been counselled on how to use it. Dis-Chem describes this as keeping “a human in the loop”.
These same rules protect the pharmacy chains from a grocer and from Amazon. Shoprite has the logistics and a small pharmacy chain. Clicks and Dis-Chem have far more pharmacists, licences and patients. But innovative retailers will figure out a model that captures the attention of consumers the same way Sixty60 did.
This is where the Prime-ification of South African retail is heading. Checkers and Pick n Pay already know what their members buy every week. The first retailer to know which medicines they take and deliver them within the hour will be very hard to leave.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
