Clothing sells to the most people online in South Africa, with 36% of online shoppers buying it, while the biggest pile of money goes through marketplaces, led by Takealot Group at R34.6 billion a year. The fastest growth is in beauty, home, pet and memberships. Inside TFG, beauty grew 21.5% and clothing grew 3.9%. But the category you pick does not decide whether you grow: TFG's online store grew 49% and Mr Price's grew 4.9%, and both of them sell clothing.
This article comes from a keynote I gave at an ecommerce live event, and you can watch the full talk above.
The room was full of online store owners, and underneath every question they asked was the same one: what should I sell next, and how do I stop losing the sales I already have?
Every number below comes from a company's own results or a named survey. When a number comes from our own client data at V8 Media, I say so.
For context, we have worked with more than 500 brands since 2018, and we co-founded Scentimental, which did R63 million in its second year, and GLOOT, a women's health brand that did R130 million last year.
Online is a tenth of South African retail, and it took 42% of the growth
All of South African retail grew 5.6% in rand terms last year. That is barely ahead of inflation, so in real terms the shops are close to standing still.
The online part grew by about 35%.
In 2025, retail grew by about R81 billion, and R34 billion of that extra money was spent online, where two years earlier online took only R16 billion of roughly R70 billion.
Online is only about 10% of all retail. It took 42% of everything retail grew by.
Online's share of retail growth almost doubled in two years
Online is about a tenth of retail, yet it took 42% of all retail growth in 2025
In 2023 online took 23% of the growth in South African retail. In 2025 it took 42%
| Year | Online's share of the growth | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 2023: retail grew about R70bn, online R16bn of it | 23% | |
| 2024: retail grew about R80bn, online R25bn of it | 31% | |
| 2025: retail grew about R81bn, online R34bn of it | 42% |
Every year online takes a bigger slice of the growth. The shops are fighting over the money that is left.
Stats SA retail trade sales at current prices. Online retail turnover from World Wide Worx, Online Retail in South Africa 2025. Rounded.
This is not new money.
It is the same customers spending the same money, just through a phone screen instead of a shop till, and World Wide Worx, which publishes the industry's annual report, now puts South African online retail at R159 billion for 2026, up 22.5% on the year before.
If your store is not taking a share of that move, somebody else is taking yours.
What sells best depends on whether you mean the most buyers, the most money or the fastest growth
When an owner asks me what sells best online, they mean one of three things. Each one has a different answer.
| The question | The answer in South Africa |
|---|---|
| What do the most people buy? | Clothing, by a long way |
| Where does the most money go? | A marketplace, mostly selling other businesses' products |
| What is growing fastest? | Beauty, home, pet and memberships |
Ask only the first question and you go and sell clothing, into the category with the most buyers and some of the slowest growth in the country.
Clothing has the most online buyers in South Africa
The World Wide Worx 2026 report draws on 23,910 interviews by Ask Afrika's Target Group Index, which makes it the biggest consumer survey in the country, and out of every 100 people who shop online, this is how many bought each category in 2025:
- Clothing: 36.0%, up from 30.2% the year before
- Groceries: 21.2%
- Womenswear: 19.7%
- Menswear: 18.9%
- Video streaming: 18.2%
- Gifts: 16.0%
- Holiday and travel: 15.6%
- Footwear: 15.3%
- Electronic goods: 15.2%
- Computer hardware: 13.9%
- Children's toys: 13.7%
- Toiletries and cosmetics: 10.2%
This list counts how many people buy. It does not count how much they spend.
A grocery shopper orders every week while a clothing shopper might order twice a year, so clothing wins on the number of buyers and groceries win on the rand each buyer spends.
Notice where beauty sits. Toiletries and cosmetics are far down the list, at 10.2%.
The biggest single pile of money goes through Takealot's marketplace
Nobody in South Africa publishes online sales by category. Not Stats SA, not World Wide Worx, not one retailer.
Two paid databases will sell you an estimate, and they disagree about which category is biggest.
What is published is sales by business, and Takealot Group sold R34.6 billion of goods in the year to March 2026, which makes it the biggest single online business in the country.
60% of that belongs to 15,000 other businesses selling on the Takealot marketplace.
Checkers Sixty60 is the other giant, at R25.5 billion in the year to June 2026, up 34.7%. Everything else is far smaller. TFG's whole online business, Bash included, is R3.5 billion.
Amazon is growing, but slower than people expected. The World Wide Worx 2026 report has 12.7% of online shoppers using Amazon, measured before Amazon launched Prime here in June 2026, against 35.3% for Takealot and 21.5% for Shein.
To be fair, most South Africans still buy on brand and retailer websites more than on marketplaces, but when you ask where the single biggest pile of money goes, it goes to a marketplace, and most of what is sold there belongs to a business like yours.
Beauty, home and pet are growing faster than clothing
This figure surprised the room most. Inside TFG, beauty grew 21.5% while clothing grew 3.9%.
TFG reported both numbers for the same year.
Beauty and home are growing faster than clothing inside the same retailers
Beauty grew more than five times faster than clothing inside the same company
Year-on-year sales growth, shops and online together, because nobody publishes category growth for online alone
| Category | Growth | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| Beauty (TFG) | +21.5% | |
| Home (Woolworths) | +14.0% | |
| Beauty (Woolworths) | +8.9% | |
| Homeware and furniture (TFG) | +8.7% | |
| Clothing (TFG) | +3.9% | |
| Jewellery (TFG) | +3.9% | |
| Cellular (TFG) | +2.0% |
Clothing has the most online buyers in South Africa and some of the slowest growth.
TFG FY2026 results to March 2026. Woolworths Holdings interim FY26 results to December 2025.
Clicks backs it up: its online sales grew 17.9%, and beauty and personal care now makes up a third of everything Clicks sells.
Beauty works online for three plain reasons. It is light and cheap to post, people buy the same product again when it runs out, and nobody sends a face cream back because it did not fit.
Home comes next. Woolworths Home grew 14%, and TFG's homeware and furniture grew 8.7%, more than double its clothing.
Pet is third.
Petshop Science sales grew 74.5% in the year to June 2026 across 185 shops, and Shoprite has put 3,500 pet products onto Sixty60 for same-day delivery, which makes pet the fastest-growing number I showed on the day.
That 74.5% is shops and Sixty60 together, because Shoprite does not split its online sales out. But think about what pet food is. It is heavy, it is bought on a schedule, and nobody wants to carry it home.
That is a delivery business.
A quarter of Takealot's sales now go to paying members
Almost nobody talks about this one. More than 25% of everything sold on Takealot now goes to TakealotMORE members.
What those members spent grew 193% in a year. Their orders grew 263%.
When you pay a monthly fee, a month without an order feels like money thrown away, so members go looking for something to buy, and the platform they already pay for is the first place they look.
At Clicks, 83.7% of sales go to ClubCard members. There are 12.9 million of them.
The two biggest retailers in their categories have quietly become membership businesses. Yet World Wide Worx found that only 10% of South African online retailers use a loyalty programme as a marketing tool.
Our whey protein subscription failed because people do not go to the gym every week
Before you launch a subscription, learn from our mistake.
Years ago, with a nutrition brand, we assumed that people who buy whey protein every month would happily sign up to have it delivered every month, and it did not work.
People buy whey every month, but they do not go to the gym every week. They get sick, work gets busy, and after three weeks off they are staring at a cupboard of unopened tubs. So they cancel.
Netflix is the opposite. However busy your life gets, you still watch an episode at night to switch off.
A subscription only survives if the product fits into the customer's worst week, not their best one.
Alex Hormozi, who writes about offers, would say we gave up on the product when we should have fixed the offer.
His fixes are practical. Let people skip or delay a delivery instead of cancelling. Give a sign-up gift worth more than the first month. And put the discount where people usually quit, the way a rice subscription he describes only gives 15% off from the fifth month, because that is when most people cancel.
South Africans are placing fewer small orders and more big ones
Nobody publishes a national average order value for South Africa. I worked one out that you can check.
Takealot Group sold R34.6 billion across more than 60 million orders. That is about R577 an order.
It includes Mr D food deliveries, which are small baskets, so a real Takealot parcel is bigger than that.
The direction matters more. According to Ask Afrika's spending figures, published by World Wide Worx, 29 out of every 100 online shoppers now spend over R2,000 online in six months, up from 23 the year before and about 14 the year before that.
At the other end, only 11 out of 100 spent under R100 in six months. Two years earlier it was about 20.
Nobody wants to pay R100 for a product and another R100 to have it delivered, so they add the small thing to a bigger order, or they pick it up at Clicks or Dis-Chem on the way home.
Your average order needs to be over R500 to make money online
Every overseas case study leaves this out.
Sending a parcel in South Africa costs roughly R60 to R210, depending on whether it goes to a locker or to someone's front door, and that cost barely changes with what is inside the box.
Take a R199 order with a normal 50% product margin. The stock cost R100. Delivery costs about R90. The payment fee is about R6.
That leaves R3 to pay for the advert that found the customer.
Work it out before you stock a cheap product
A R199 order leaves about R3 to pay for the advert that found the customer
The same 50% product margin and the same R90 delivery, on two different order sizes
A R199 order
- The customer paysR199
- What the stock cost you- R100
- Getting it to their door- R90
- The payment fee, about 3%- R6
- Left to pay for the advertR3
A R600 order
- The customer paysR600
- What the stock cost you- R300
- Getting it to their door- R90
- The payment fee, about 3%- R18
- Left to pay for the advertR192
Delivery costs the same whether the parcel holds R199 or R600 of stock, so a small order has almost nothing left for marketing.
An illustration, not measured data. South African parcel delivery runs roughly R60 to R210 depending on locker or door.
Now take a R600 order with the same margin: after R300 of stock, R90 of delivery and about R18 in fees, you have R192 left to find the customer.
The delivery cost stayed the same. Only the basket size changed.
This one sum kills most of the cheap trending product ideas you read about online, and it explains the two giants, because groceries clear the threshold on basket size and Takealot clears it on scale.
We see the other side of it at V8 Media all the time. Owners come to us having spent R100,000 or R200,000 on a website and stock, with almost nothing left for marketing, and if people cannot see you, they cannot buy from you.
You do not fix a small basket by marking every price up.
The cheaper fix is a bundle, because three of the product in one parcel cost you the same delivery as one. Our guide to ecommerce profit margin benchmarks goes deeper on the margin side.
South Africans spend the most from the 24th to the first few days of the month
Stitch, a payments company, published its real transaction data for the first three months of 2026. The average basket on the 24th is 46% bigger than on the 8th.
These are the same shoppers. They have just been paid.
South Africans spend the most in the days after payday
The same shopper puts 46% more in the basket on the 24th than on the 8th
The 24th, the 25th, 20:00 and Tuesdays beat the rest of the month
- 8thMid-month basketThe baseline
- +46%Basket on the 24thBigger than on the 8th
- 25thMost orders placedThe busiest day of the month
- 20:00Busiest hourAfter the kids are in bed
- TuesdayBiggest basketOf any day of the week
If your ad budget, your stock and your email sends are spread evenly across the month, a third of them land in the week people are broke.
Stitch, How South Africans Shop and Pay in 2026, Q1 2026 transaction data.
The 25th has the most orders of any day, the busiest hour is 20:00, when the kids are in bed and people are scrolling, and Tuesday has the biggest average basket of any day of the week.
Now our own client data, so treat this as experience rather than a published figure.
From the 24th to about the 4th is the most important stretch of the month for an online store, and when a brand drops the ball over payday, we typically see that month's revenue fall by 20% to 30%.
A payday on a Tuesday is the best case. Monday is chaos at work, but by Tuesday evening people have time to shop, and they still have money on Wednesday and Thursday.
A payday on a Friday is harder. People spend that weekend out with friends, not on their phones.
Most owners spread their ad budget, stock and emails evenly across the month. That puts a third of the effort into the week people are broke.
A mid-month 10% off sale does not fix it either, because 10% off is still money the customer does not have until the 25th.
Blue Sense Digital, an ecommerce ad agency we learn from, adds a warning about Meta ads: a bigger budget does not turn into sales on the same day, because people need time to see an ad and think about it. So raise your spend a few days before payday, and bring it down gradually afterwards. We wrote more on this in how to use payday to grow an online store.
The category you pick does not decide whether you grow
This is how much each big retailer grew its online sales in its latest results:
- Bash and TFG online: +49.2%
- Pick n Pay online: +37.5%
- Checkers Sixty60: +34.7%
- Woolies Dash: +23.0%
- Clicks online: +17.9%
- Takealot Group: +14.0%
- Mr Price online: +4.9%
Mr Price is a clothing retailer, and clothing has the most online buyers in the country. So why is its online store barely growing?
Being in a growing category does not make you a growing business.
TFG and Mr Price sell clothing in the same country to the same customers, and one grew ten times faster online than the other, because what decides it is whether people understand what you sell, trust you, and see your store as the place to buy that thing.
Alex Hormozi puts it plainly. Once you know how to create demand, you do not need the market to lift you.
We hear the opposite often. An owner tells us the beauty market is booming, so their beauty store should be scaling, and it is not, because the market was never the problem.
A product people buy four times a year beats one they buy once
If you take one practical thing from this article, take this.
Imagine two products that each leave you R90 after every cost. Product A gets bought once every few years, so each customer is worth R90. Product B gets bought four times a year, so each customer is worth R360 a year.
The profit per order is the same. Four orders a year is four times the money.
That is why beauty is growing so fast. You put face cream on every night, good week or bad week, and you run out on a schedule, which is why I now buy my own every three months instead of stealing my wife's.
Blue Sense adds a sensible order to this: start with one hero product that passes these tests, sell it hard, and build a list of happy customers from it before you widen the range. We explain how to bring those customers back in how to get repeat customers in South Africa.
Ask these five questions before you add a product to your store
Most owners answer the first two questions and skip the rest. Ask them in this order.
Most owners skip the three questions that decide whether a product makes money
Ask these five questions, in this order, before you stock anything
Ask all five in this order, and do not stop after demand and margin
- 1Are people already buying it, and is that growing?Check the category, not your gut. Beauty, home and pet are growing faster than clothing.
- 2What do you keep after stock, delivery, fees, ads and returns?If you fund the business yourself, aim for a product margin of 50% or more.
- 3How often will the same person buy it again?R90 kept four times a year is R360 a customer. R90 kept once is R90.
- 4Why would someone buy it from you and not from Takealot or Temu?15,000 sellers on Takealot can list the same product you just found.
- 5What does it cost to handle?Size, weight, breakage, sizing, expiry and how often it comes back.
Questions 3, 4 and 5 are where most new products fail, and they are the ones most owners skip.
Jandre de Beer, V8 Media, from working with more than 500 brands since 2018. Takealot seller count from Takealot Group results to March 2026.
1. Is there demand, and is it growing? Use the category data above, not your gut.
2. What do you keep after every cost? Stock, delivery, payment fees, ads and returns all come out first, and if you fund the business yourself, as we do with the brands we co-found, you want a product margin of 50% or more.
Patient investors let you run tighter margins for longer. Electronics is the exception people raise, and it proves the rule: the margin might be 10%, but 10% of a R20,000 television is still R2,000.
3. How often will the same person buy it again? Most owners skip this one.
4. Why would someone buy it from you and not from Takealot or Temu? 15,000 sellers on Takealot can list the same product you just found, and if a competitor can copy your product in a week, all you have left to compete on is price.
5. What does it cost to handle? Size, weight, breakage, sizing, expiry, regulation and returns. A shirt returned in the wrong size gets paid for twice and sold once.
Buying cheap stock overseas and marking it up is getting harder every year
If your plan is to import something cheap and resell it, three things have changed:
- November 2024: SARS ended the concession that let parcels under R500 into the country on a flat 20% with no VAT.
- February 2025: full tariff bands of 20% to 45% apply, plus 15% VAT. An item that used to land at R120 now lands at about R166.
- November 2025: a private person is capped at R150,000 of imports a year before they need a formal customs code.
The three changes worked.
According to World Wide Worx, cross-border ecommerce growth into South Africa fell to 7%, from 30% to 50% before the changes, and Shein's own growth here slowed to 11%.
Shein and Temu set your price ceiling, SARS sets your cost floor, and a generic imported product gets squeezed from both sides.
Most lost sales happen after the shopper has already decided to buy
When owners ask us where to start improving their store, they expect an answer about ads.
The World Wide Worx 2026 report points somewhere else. It asked 201 South African online retailers why baskets get abandoned, and a declined card is now the top reason, named by 61.2% of them.
A declined card is now the top reason South African shoppers leave without paying
Most lost sales happen after the shopper has already decided to buy
Share of 201 South African online retailers naming each reason. A declined card went from third place to first in one year
| Reason the basket was abandoned | 2026 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| The card was declined | 61.2% | 27.9% |
| Shipping fees | 51.7% | 31.3% |
| They were forced to create an account | 43.8% | 13.9% |
| Checkout was long or complicated | 40.3% | 37.3% |
| Website or checkout errors | 31.3% | Not asked |
Every reason scored higher than the year before, so read the order, not the size of each number. All of them are fixable on your side of the checkout.
World Wide Worx retailer survey, Online Retail in South Africa 2026 and 2025. What merchants report, not a controlled test.
Most of those declines are not the bank saying no. The same report found that the main causes of failed payments are checkout or website errors (60.7%), not enough money in the account (50.7%), and customers giving up halfway through the extra bank security step (50.7%).
Only 1.5% of retailers get every card payment approved, and 8% do not even know their approval rate. Every failed payment is a customer who wanted to pay you and could not.
Shipping fees come second, at 51.7%. Forced account creation is third, at 43.8%, up from 13.9% the year before.
That third one is the easiest to fix: let people check out as a guest, and offer the account after they have paid.
Now a fair warning from the two sources we check our advice against.
Alex Hormozi says a business is held back by one main problem at a time, whether that is traffic, conversion, price, or customers leaving, and that fixing the wrong one wastes your money. Blue Sense puts checkout friction last on its list of page fixes, after a clear page, the wording, the offer and the proof.
So do not guess. Look at your own numbers.
If plenty of people add to cart and start checkout but few of them pay, your leak is the checkout, and that is where you fix first. If hardly anyone adds to cart, the problem sits earlier, in the offer or the wording, and no checkout fix will save it. Our post on measuring your checkout process shows you how to tell.
South African retailers say customer service matters more than price
Most owners assume price is what wins online. The retailers disagree.
In the World Wide Worx 2025 survey, this is what South African online retailers named as important to their success:
- Customer service: 69.7%
- Stock availability: 66.7%, up from 54.8% a year earlier
- Product range and quality: 58.7%
- Competitive pricing: 30.3%
- Delivery options and speed: 13.9%
Customer service never feels like it pays you back in the moment, but answering fast, telling people where their order is, and helping them choose the right product is how a stranger starts to trust a store they have never bought from.
Stock availability jumped 12 points in a year.
We see why all the time: a brand runs out of stock just before payday, sales drop, and the owner blames the marketing. Blue Sense adds that running out also disrupts what the ad platforms have learned about your best sellers, so results stay weaker for a while after the stock is back.
Price still matters, because a better margin lets you outbid a competitor for the same customer. It just sits fourth on the retailers' own list.
People spend more freely on products tied to a strong feeling, like beauty, pets, weddings and babies
At the end of the talk, someone asked which categories I am most excited about, and my answer was any product that speaks to a strong emotion.
Beauty is about how you feel and how others see you. A wedding is the one day people want to be perfect, so they spend more. People treat their pets like children. Babies, children's clothes and education work the same way.
Someone else asked about nutrition and wellness. My answer was to build a community.
One of our brands runs a Facebook group of more than 10,000 people who help each other reach their health goals, and when a member stands in Clicks choosing between two products, they pick the brand that helped them.
Both sources push back on the order here, and it is worth hearing. Blue Sense ranks the product, the range, the quality of the customers you win and the service first, and email, WhatsApp and groups last. Hormozi says a great community is usually the result of a strong brand, not the cause of it.
I agree with the order.
A community helps a good product grow. It cannot save a product nobody returns to.
Six things that decide whether your online store grows in South Africa
- Online is about a tenth of South African retail, and it took 42% of all retail growth in 2025.
- Clothing has the most online buyers, but beauty, home, pet and memberships are growing fastest.
- A growing category will not grow your business for you. TFG's online store grew 49% and Mr Price's grew 4.9%, and both sell clothing.
- A product people buy four times a year is worth four times as much as one they buy once, and your average order needs to clear R500 before delivery eats the profit.
- The same shopper spends 46% more on the 24th than on the 8th, so put your budget, stock and emails into payday week.
- Declined cards, shipping fees and forced sign-ups lose sales after the shopper has decided to buy. Check your own checkout numbers before you buy more traffic.
We'll show you where your online store is losing sales, and what to fix first
If your store gets traffic but the sales are not following, we will look at your checkout, your average order and how you spend around payday, and tell you honestly which one is holding you back. See how we run ecommerce growth, Meta Ads and Google Ads for South African brands.
Claim Your Free AuditShort answers if you sell online in South Africa, or want to start
What is the best product to sell online in South Africa?
A product people buy again on a schedule, that keeps a margin of 50% or more, and that fills an order of more than R500. Beauty, home and pet products fit this best right now, and all three are growing faster than clothing.
What do South Africans buy the most online?
Clothing, bought by 36% of online shoppers in 2025 according to the World Wide Worx 2026 report. Groceries are second at 21.2%, followed by womenswear at 19.7% and menswear at 18.9%. Groceries move more money per buyer, because people order them every week.
How big is ecommerce in South Africa in 2026?
World Wide Worx puts South African online retail at R159 billion in 2026, up 22.5% on 2025. That is just over 10% of all retail in the country.
What is the average online order value in South Africa?
About R577, worked out from Takealot Group's R34.6 billion in sales across more than 60 million orders in the year to March 2026. That includes small Mr D food orders, so an average Takealot parcel is higher.
Why do South African shoppers abandon their baskets?
In the World Wide Worx 2026 retailer survey, the top reasons were declined cards (61.2%), shipping fees (51.7%), being forced to create an account (43.8%) and a long or complicated checkout (40.3%).
When do South Africans spend the most online?
Right after payday. Stitch's 2026 payment data shows the average basket on the 24th is 46% bigger than on the 8th, the 25th has the most orders, 20:00 is the busiest hour and Tuesday has the biggest baskets.
Is importing cheap products from China still profitable in South Africa?
It is much harder than it was. Since February 2025, imports pay full tariffs of 20% to 45% plus 15% VAT, so an item that landed at R120 now lands at about R166, and Shein and Temu set a low price ceiling.
