The Judging Process

Entries are judged and nominated for an award according to Shop! South Africa’s set criteria by a panel of esteemed retail and brand professionals.

Each judge is allocated one or more categories. Nobody ever judges their “home” category and judging is completed “blind’ ,without the judges knowing the identity  of the  entrant; any information which identifies the entrant is redacted from the entry that the judges see and replaced for the public case study.

The initial round of judging is done online and judges are required to allocate – and justify – their scores for each of the criteria below.

After the online stage, the panel gathers in person for a final day, with full and fair discussion of initial nomination recommendations before a final selection is made.

Judges are always looking for best practice but are not obliged to award a gold in every category. There can be a maximum of one gold per category, but where judges feel the standard of entries is so high, they may give multiple silver and bronze awards in a category.

Judging Criteria

Our judges met face-to-face in September for a day of debate and critique of all the entries, settling on their placings.

Nominations can be found on on this site and the awards will be presented on November 5th.