Across the major retail categories that we track – Grocery, General Merchandise and Apparel – online shopping makes up about 10% of total spending.

Online channels are growing faster than in-store retail – this is well-documented and not especially interesting. What is interesting, however, is analysing the differences in scale of these online businesses… Some have become enormous operations, accounting for a significant share of consumer spending in certain demographics; others manage to attract a lot of attention but are actually quite small in terms of absolute scale.  

Here’s what to expect in this note: 

• We estimate the value of spending at the major international online retailers and at the local challengers, using reported data and Slant’s proprietary spending data. 
• We look at how spending online compares to in-store, across different retail groups and within those groups. For example, how does spending online at Clicks compare to its in-store business? Does a Sixty60 shopper spend more at Dis-Chem than an in-store Checkers shopper?
• We’ve done deep dives into most of the online juggernauts in the past – Shein, Temu, Sixty60… Now it’s time to compare them.

Gorillas and minnows

Sixty60 is the poster child for online retail in South Africa. Shoprite reported sales of R19bn for the year ending June 2025 – a statistic that was received with great fanfare. This week the group announced a further 35% growth in the division, meaning that Sixty60 is now probably closer to R22bn annual sales – roughly half the size of Woolworths’ entire Food division (R52bn) and 10⁺x larger than Woolies Dash (7.2% of sales or ~R2bn).

Each of the grocery retailers has a bike on the block. All of them, except for Checkers, also have a partnership with a food delivery service like Mr D or Uber Eats. But none of them operate at the scale of Sixty60.

Looking at competitors, PnP has reported strong growth in its online business (34%), but asap!’s overall contribution to sales is murky, as is the contribution from sales via Mr D. Spar 2U was late to market and the service was only available in select locations. Coverage has since grown to ~950 locations, a third of which operate via Uber Eats, but spending still pales in comparison to Sixty60. 

In General Merchandise online, Takealot is the gorilla. Parent company Naspers provides some detail about Takealot.com (the online retailer) and Mr D (the food and grocery delivery service). Using this information, we estimate that Takealot.com accounts for R21bn of the group’s ~R32bn in Gross Merchandise Value for the year ending September 2025. In other words, it’s roughly 5% smaller than Sixty60. 

What about Clicks and Dis-Chem? Neither company does any meaningful reporting about their digital endeavours. Clicks says customers who research online and purchase in-store make up 4.1% of sales. This metric is presumably achievable because 83% of Clicks sales are linked to ClubCard holders, and their online browsing sessions can be tracked. It’s neat, but it definitely overstates the real contribution of online purchases to total sales. In 2023, for example, Clicks indicated that online accounted for only 1.3% of sales. 

Dis-Chem’s reporting is even more opaque. The last reference to e-commerce sales that we can identify was in August 2023. At that point, online sales were pegged at ~R200m.

Here at Slant, we’ve already done a lot of research into Shein and Temu. Our data shows that both have grown spending share exponentially over the past two years. But how big are they against the backdrop described above?

Below, we benchmark 2025 spending data for multiple online retailers (or their online channels) relative to Sixty60 and across various income brackets. Segmenting for income is interesting because it highlights significant behaviour patterns.

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