South Africa’s prominent grocery retailers, including Checkers, Pick n Pay, and Woolworths, offer online shopping with fast delivery. However, a MyBroadband analysis has revealed that Zulzi beats them on pricing.

MyBroadband compared pricing for same-day delivery grocery apps, including Checkers Sixty60, Pick n Pay asap!, Woolies Dash, and Zulzi.

We selected a generalised basket to compare prices and avoided items like meat and other groceries priced based on weight.

This is because grocery apps charge a one-off price for such items — which is often significantly higher than the cost of what your receive — and then reverse the difference once the order is completed.

As we didn’t complete the order, adding these items to the basket wouldn’t have made a fair comparison.

It should also be noted that Woolworths does not sell many common brands through its app, and we had to find close matches for the items we chose from its house brand.

The basket we selected includes the following:

• 2ℓ Full Cream fresh milk — Clover for Checkers, Pick n Pay, and Zulzi. House brand for Woolworths;
• Sliced white bread 700g — Albany superior white bread for Checkers, Pick n Pay, and Zulzi. House brand for Woolworths;
• Lays salted potato chips 120g;
• Jacobs Kronung instant coffee 200g;
• Sprite 2ℓ; and,
• Coca-cola 2ℓ.

The only other fee added to each basket is the delivery charge. All four apps charged R35.

However, Zulzi offers free delivery on orders over R350. Our basket didn’t quite make the cut.

Our analysis revealed that Zulzi was the cheapest for our basket, coming in at R17.50 less than the runner-up Woolies Dash.

Ordered on Zulzi, the basket totalled R302.94, including the R35 delivery charge. If our basket had reached R350, Zulzi likely would have won by a larger margin.

Woolies Dash charges R320.44 for the basket we selected, with Pick n Pay asap! following closely on R323.74.

Checkers Sixty60 was the most expensive — but only by a small margin — at R323.94.

Pick n Pay asap! is offering a special on the 200g Jacobs Kronung instant coffee jar, pricing it at R119.99.

However, we did not include promotions in the comparison and used its regular pricing of R159.99.

A basket price comparison between Checkers Sixty60, Pick n Pay asap!, Woolies Dash, and Zulzi, is summarised in the table below.