Takealot vs Makro vs Incredible — cheapest shops for load-shedding backup

South African consumers looking for the best prices on some of the most popular products to shield them from the impact of load-shedding might want to use online stores rather than conventional physical retailers.

MyBroadband recently compared the prices of 15 popular load-shedding products from two popular online shops — GeeWiz and Takealot — and two well-established brick-and-mortar retailers — JD Group and Massmart.

Our analysis included portable power stations, inverters, a standalone battery, rechargeable load-shedding bulbs, power banks, and surge protectors.

We found that Takealot tended to have the most affordable prices on load-shedding products, with six of the fifteen we compared cheaper through the platform.

In addition, none of the products we looked at were the most expensive at Takealot.

Six of the products were the cheapest at GeeWiz, but it also had the three most expensive prices.

JD Group’s Incredible and HiFi Corp received a balanced result, offering three products with the best prices and three with the worst prices.

Its selection was also the most limited, with three products on sale from all the other retailers not available from its stores.

Despite having three separate stores in its portfolio and MyBroadband only taking the cheapest price from each retailer, Massmart had the most expensive prices on eight products.

Only one of the products was the cheapest at one of its stores.

It was interesting to note that third-party resellers sold many of the products that were most expensive from Makro.

However, this alone does not explain the higher prices, as many of the products on sale from Takealot were also offered by third-party resellers.

The table below compares the best prices on 15 load-shedding products available from the major retailers we considered in our comparison.

While these general price trends were interesting, it is necessary to emphasise that this was a limited comparison.

Numerous other load-shedding products are available from these retailers, so a shopper’s experience might vary greatly depending on the basket of goods.

Furthermore, we focused on just a handful of retailers, while there is a myriad of other options to consider.

If the best price is what you’re after, you should search through the catalogues of other reputable retailers, like Bob Shop and Leroy Merlin.