Our methodology
This dataset is compiled from publicly available business listings using systematic, grid-based collection that covers every province of South Africa, followed by geospatial validation workflows. Automated quality checks and manual analyst reviews are applied to improve coordinate precision, address standardisation, duplicate detection and overall analytical consistency.
Brand attribution is performed by normalising trading names against known retail chain and buying-group identities. Province attribution is derived from each record's verified WGS84 coordinates.
The dataset is periodically reviewed and refreshed to reflect known network changes, new openings, closures and relocations.
Collection
We run systematic, anchor-based collection across a national grid of towns, suburbs and commercial nodes, using the same business-category taxonomy that major mapping platforms use. Each anchor sweep captures every matching business in the area, and overlapping sweeps are deduplicated on name and coordinates.
Validation & quality control
Records pass through automated checks, coordinate plausibility within South Africa, duplicate detection, name normalisation and chain-brand attribution, followed by manual analyst review of flagged records. Province attribution is derived spatially from verified coordinates.
Standard delivery schema
Every dataset ships with the same field structure, so files combine cleanly across brands and categories:
| GUID | Stable unique identifier for each location record |
| Title | Trading name of the store as listed publicly |
| Brand | Detected retail chain or buying group (blank for independents) |
| Category | Business category (e.g. Hardware store, Building materials supplier) |
| Latitude | WGS84 latitude, 7-decimal precision |
| Longitude | WGS84 longitude, 7-decimal precision |
| Address | Street address as published on the public listing |
| Province | South African province, derived from coordinates |
| Phone | Published contact number where available |
| Google Rating | Public review rating (0 to 5) where available |
| Review Count | Number of public reviews where available |
| Google Maps URL | Source listing URL for verification |
| Last Verified | Date the record was last collected and validated |
Update cycle
Brand location datasets are refreshed quarterly. Each refresh re-crawls the network, flags closures and relocations, and picks up newly listed stores. Purchases include the current snapshot; refresh subscriptions are available on request.