Local Competetor Analysis

Here is the competitor analysis for some local stores and secondary competitors such as online stores:

* Shoprite: (http://www.shoprite.co.za)

Strengths - The most noticeable strength that I spotted on their website is that it is easy to navigate through. Their navigation bar is place on the top of the site with headings that makes sense to users. By clicking on each link, the user knows exactly where they are going. It doesn't contain confusing sub pages like the pnp site does.
They also allow for advertising on the side of their page that is not part of the shoprite brand eg. computicket. They also include a customer service heading with different sub headings for people that want to for example buy bus tickets or money market.
They do also include a suggestion box, which is always a strength to have.

Weaknesses - The main weakness here is that although you can navigate quite easily through the site, when it comes to searching for products' price and info, it is not available. This tells me that although shoprite is our competitor, they haven't yet targeted online customers as one of their main target markets.
On of the weird things I noticed was that their address and phone details for their main office wasn't displayed on the "contact us" page, but instead on the "about us" page. It makes more sense to have it shown on the "contact us" page.
Although they have a "contact us" page, they don't have a list of all the areas in which we can find a shoprite store.


*Checkers: (http://www.woolworths.co.za/caissa.asp?Page=ITB4_RHContext&Post=Home)

Strengths - Immediate noticeable strength about this website is if I look on the top, at the navigation bar, I see the option of "online shop". This is something that other stores haven't yet achieved on their sites and therefore is a huge strength to have.
On the top left on the site page, you even see your "shopping bag" with how many items you have in it - this creates a mapping effect as if you really were shopping at Woolies.
Like its competitors sites, they all have a lot of information to share with their users. But I feel that Woolies has done the best job in grouping that information together, so it doesn't look like the information is overflowing (pnp site)

Weakness - The one that stood out most was, when I wanted to go to their "contact us" page, there was an actual coding error on that particular page. Such an important page and it does not work? esh!
Unlike the other sites so far, they don't have a suggestion box, nor do they have a search option within their site.

*Spar: (http://www.spar.co.za/HomePage1.aspx)

Strengths - Very noticeable on the top rght hand side of the site, there is a store locator option and a contact us page with all the telephone numbers of their head stores displayed.
There is also a search option available.

Weakness - although there is a search bar, I tried searching for dog food and not even one hit came up. I seems to me that the Spar website is totally dedicated to just information seekers and not for online shopping, because they don't even display what products they have.

*Kalahari: (http://www.kalahari.net)

Although Kalahari.net isn't a direct competitor to Pnp, we still decided to look at it from a "online shopping" competitor's view.

Strengths - the search works! unlike any of the previous search bar websites, this on actually have me hits to "dog food", although they weren't exactly the type of dog food that I was looking for, but at least they gave feedback.
Another strength that this site has is it shows many of their products as thumbnails, and not just text. I feel that this is quite important because the user knows what he/she is looking at to buy. There is also evident cross selling and up selling - eg the DVD section.
They actually have two search bars now that I noticed. One "global" search and then one search option within a specific category. This narrows down the amount of relevant hits to your search.
Easy to navigate through!

Weakness - the site isn't really visually appealing. The design of the website is somewhat boring and plain. Other than that, I can't really find anything else that could be a possible weakness as I feel this site really works as it is. It serves its function! ( if there are any other weaknesses, please feel free to add)