These days, managing your life via your smartphone is nothing new – whether it’s organising travel, booking accommodation, banking, reading the news or tracking your fitness.

But when it comes to something as mundane as grocery shopping, apps that allow us to do this have taken longer to materialise – probably because shopping for a whole lot of smaller items and brands from different places is fairly complex and personal. Luckily, it seems technology has finally caught up.

As a Joburger, you can now choose from at least three grocery shopping apps such as Zulzi, OneCart and Grocerease, where you can order groceries, over-the-counter pharmacy items, liquor, pet food and even restaurant food from a cluster of stores in your area via a single mobile interface.

The app then uses the city as a warehouse, matching your delivery location with the stores closest to you among big retailers like Woolworths, Pick n Pay, Pick n Pay Liquor, Dis-Chem and Clicks.

Some apps also let you select the specific stores you prefer, which can be handy if you prefer a particular franchised Pick n Pay to the one closest to you, for example.

Once you’ve selected and placed your order, a personal shopper assembles your shopping cart on your behalf, and a driver – some companies use registered Taxify or Uber drivers – delivers it to your door. Most apps promise delivery within an hour or two, or you can select a scheduled time that suits you better.

As with other food apps like Uber Eats and OrderIn, you can monitor the progress of your order in real time.

With the arrival of these grocery apps, the days of a frustrating grocery shopping experience – the traffic, the parking, not to mention how time-consuming it all is – seem, thankfully, to be numbered.