South Africa's best and worst-rated shopping malls named, with eight of the 10 worst in Gauteng

We used the DataForSEO Business Listings database to pull the South African Google Maps listings filed as a shopping mall that had at least 300 reviews on 5 October 2026, 1,197 listings in all.

We kept shopping malls and shopping centres. Closed centres, single shops, markets, office parks, mall entrances and duplicate listings for the same centre were left out. Where a mall sits inside a bigger precinct with its own listing, such as Victoria Wharf at the V&A Waterfront, the mall's own listing was used, and one centre whose listing carried a run of reviews about a single restaurant inside it, rather than the centre, was also left out. Star counts were refreshed from each centre's live Google listing. That left the 678 centres with at least 1,000 Google reviews each, 3,274,335 reviews in all.

Each centre was ranked by its exact average rating, worked out from its count of one, two, three, four and five-star reviews rather than the rounded score Google displays, so centres that show the same rating on Google are still put in order. Where two centres have exactly the same average, the one with the larger share of one-star reviews ranks lower. Every centre in the top and bottom 10 was checked for a sudden burst of reviews in a short period, and none was left out.

Each province's average gives every one of its centres equal weight (the mean of the centre averages) and is shown for the eight provinces with at least 10 centres in the ranking. The Northern Cape has six, so it is left out of the province ranking, but its best and worst rated centres are listed below.