South African Physical Shop Apps

Have you ever done a search of "South Africa" in your app store?  I have, I was trying to find apps that were actually relevant to the country I was staying in!  As simple as that sounds it was a hard task.  Searching for apps that actually reference South Africa simply brings up a bunch of rubbish apps that you would never want near your phone.

So I thought that I should tackle trying to find you all some apps that are relevant to South Africa and, having reviewed South African News what better way to carry on than with the Shopping apps.  Mostly I have reviewed the Grocery Shopping Apps, but I added in Edgars because when I was almost finished typing up I saw they had an app, and it was actually the best App.  I hope we can convince PnP and Checkers to put more effort into their apps.

Pick 'n Pay

First off, the PnP app is not great, I only found it useful for the smart shopper card.  While you are standing in the queue you can switch your points to cash and you can load vouchers based on what you already have in your trolley. However when I tried to get the cashier to ring up the vouchers on my phone I faced the usual "I don't know what to do with that" problem.

New technology is introduced and it becomes hard to use because the shop hasn't bothered to educate it's cashiers how to ring it up.  There is even an option that you can tap that tells the cashier what steps to go through and they still didn't get it.  They HAD to ask someone else and I luckily eventually came right.  I'm not that used to being an earlier adopter that I have the patience to teach each new cashier how to load my vouchers.

You can also choose to donate your point to charity if you like... perhaps you'd just like to see general promotions as well.  Not something that I worry to check, I must say.


What else do i expect the app to do?  I dunno, most American shop apps these days have recipes, shopping lists and so much more.  I can't help bumping into them when I'm trying to find a decent shopping list app here in South Africa.

Checkers

Checkers has basically the same app as PnP, who copied who?  Perhaps you can tell me in the comments section.  

You sign up, you get a bunch of coupons which seem to be worth a whole lot of money (I can save a whole R2746.50! Yay!), you can select you want and key in your WCode at the cashier. 
 I haven't actually shopped with this app, but I imagine you will get the same problem when you present this to a cashier, what do I do with this!
I dunno, maybe Checkers does better with training their staff.

Here you can see the Coupons that are available and basically you just select them so that there is a huge tick and tap Redeem all Coupons at the top.  You then can go to the Cashier and type in your WCode. Who knows what the cashier has to do first to allow you to type in your WCode!

So yeah, nothing much better than PnP.

Woolworths

The Woolworths app seems to be the best and worst of them.  I guess its more like a credit card app.  You can get your statements of what you purchased, but that is it. Of course, you need to have an account with Woolworths to do this.

So the Woolworths app is not really a shopping app, but more an app for its financial services.  I simply include it here because Woolworths is a shop and they have an app.  Nothing much else to say I'm afraid.

Edgars

Having only discovered this app at the end of writing this article I am pleasantly surprised that Edgars has actually added a shopping trolley. You can scan your items as you shop.  I would use this to see how much I have in my trolley and am going to spend at the check-out.  However you can use it to "order" the items and have them delivered to the store.  I'm not sure how long this "delivery" takes, but it would be weird if it took more than a few minutes, you have to scan or type in the barcode to add items to your basket.

So it has it's problems, but at least they are doing more than the other shops!  You can view your Thank-U Points, you can see your account info and you can scan their items to add to a list of items.  You might even want to just scan items to add them to a wish list for the end of the month!

So certainly, my vote goes to the Edgars app.  At least its more useful than giving you vouchers or telling you your balance.  It actually does both AND you can create a shopping list, whoa, stop the bus! What over acheivers!

Please leave a comment below or share the post on Facebook if you like this or have a favourite shopping app.