Shoprite’s Sixty60 is now looking to do your grocery shopping for you with the introduction of a new, personalised AI-powered shopping assistant – Pixie.
Pixie – developed entirely in-house by ShopriteX – predicts what it thinks individual customers need, and when they need it. This marks the latest step in Sixty60’s evolution, Shoprite says – using AI to make the app faster to use, more personalised and, ultimately, simpler to complete your shopping.
Shopping that knows you
At its core, Pixie learns from how each customer shops. Based on individual purchase habits, restocking patterns and preferences, it surfaces only relevant product recommendations making it easier to find and reorder the things customers buy regularly.
The Smart Basket feature presents product cards in a brand-new interface that lets users simply swipe to browse, swipe up to remove, or swipe down to add to their basket. This means that the days of searching and scrolling through endless product catalogues to find regulars or relevant products are limited.
Beyond a fresh user experience, the retailer says Pixie presents customers with personalised offers based on what they actually buy, as well as relevant, rather than random, deals.
“This is the dawn of using the best of AI to make shopping simpler and more personalised for consumers,” says Neil Schreuder, chief strategy and innovation officer for the Shoprite Group. “Pixie is like a little friend, assisting each customer quietly in the background, making shopping and saving effortless.
“Shopping used to be something you did,” he adds. “But now it’s something Pixie, your personalised shopping assistant, handles for you. It’s shopping, magically simplified.”
Home-grown technology, built for South African shoppers
Pixie was developed by a cross‑functional ShopriteX team of product designers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and software developers. Built on the same customer-focused philosophy that created Sixty60, Pixie is local technology developed by a South African team for South African shoppers.
Xtra Savings, the country’s largest retail rewards programme, powers Pixie’s personalisation engine that gets smarter with every shop. It is built on a foundation of privacy and trust, never compromising individual customer data.
Pixie launches in beta with Xtra Savings Plus members first. Future plans will see it becoming even more helpful – with conversational features that extend Pixie’s capabilities beyond just recommendations to automatically reordering household essentials, or even planning weekly meals based on a customer’s budget or what’s in their pantry.