Plenty of people type shilajit, Dis-Chem, Clicks and Takealot into Google in one go, and the reason isn’t hard to guess. They want somebody bigger than a random Instagram account to have done the checking already. Sensible instinct. A pharmacy chain has a buying department, a head office and a name it would rather not damage. A marketplace has a review count and a paper trail. Both feel steadier than a jar of black resin bought through a DM.
We sell shilajit, so weigh this accordingly. But we’re not going to tell you those channels are bad, because they aren’t. They just don’t do the one job most buyers assume they’ve already done.
We won’t tell you what any named shop stocks or charges today either. Stock rotates, sellers vanish and prices move, and any article quoting a shelf price is quoting a screenshot from some Tuesday months ago. How each channel works doesn’t change, though, and that’s the part worth ten minutes of your time.
A chain buyer checks paperwork. Is the supplier a registered business, is the label legal, is there batch traceability, is the shelf life right, will the invoices reconcile. That work is real and it screens out a fair amount of nonsense. But nobody at head office is titrating fulvic acid, and shelf space has never been a chemistry result.
Pharmacy pricing also sits at the expensive end. Resin in South Africa runs roughly R13 to R46 a gram, and the R30 to R46 band is mostly small jars carrying retail rent, markup and import costs. Price per gram is the only honest way to compare a 15 g jar against a 40 g one. Ours makes the point. The 40 g at R999 has a sticker price that makes people flinch, then works out at R25 a gram, which is squarely mid-market, while the 15 g at R500 sits at R33 a gram. The bands are set out in our South African price guide.
What the shelf does give you is a person and an address. You can hold the jar, ask the woman behind the counter what moves, and know the shop will still be standing there in March. That’s worth real money. It just isn’t testing.
A marketplace is a shopfront with a rotating cast behind it. Some listings are sold by the retailer itself, most by third-party sellers who list, sell out, rebrand and relist. Delivery and payment belong to the platform. Sourcing belongs to whoever set the listing up. And that person can change without the listing changing.
Which is why the review sections read the way they do. Scroll a shilajit listing long enough and you’ll find the same question asked five different ways: is this real. Nobody asks that under a tub of whey. Resin is a black sticky mass that smells like tar, and a dyed blend of shale, coffee and wax looks identical in a photograph and close enough in a jar.
Between the two channels we’d take the pharmacy shelf, and it isn’t close. A chain has a name to lose and a buyer who signed something. A marketplace listing has a display name that can change on a Tuesday, and the reviews underneath it carry on as though nothing happened.
| Where you’re buying | What it gives you | What it doesn’t answer |
|---|---|---|
| Pharmacy chain | A counter, a face behind it, a supplier vetted on paperwork | Which lab tested which batch, and for what |
| Online marketplace | Tracked delivery and hundreds of reviews to read | Who the seller is this month, and where the resin came from |
| Direct from a brand | The certificate, batch number and sourcing, if published | Whether anything is published at all, which is rather the point |
Start at the bottom. Open the reviews, move the sort off most helpful or most recent, and go lowest rated first. If the listing only gives you a star breakdown, tap the one-star bar to filter down to it. Five-star supplement reviews are mostly about the courier, and the courier isn’t what you’re buying.
Then read for patterns instead of moods:
What you won’t find in any review section is a heavy metals result, and that’s the gap that bothers us most. A 2025 analysis in BMC Chemistry (PMID 39827344) tested six commercial shilajit products and found thallium in five of them. Six products is a tiny sample and it says nothing about any brand on any South African shelf. What it does say is that the question deserves an answer before you eat something daily for three months. The checks you can run at home are in how to spot fake shilajit.
We’ve looked across pharmacy shelves, marketplace listings and brand sites for a while now, and we still haven’t found a single South African retail listing that publishes a batch-numbered certificate of analysis you can open and read. Plenty of labels say “lab tested”. Tested by which lab, on which batch, for which metals, using which method? A certificate answers all four on one page. A claim answers none of them.
Here’s ours, so you know what you’re comparing against. Batch 250915 was analysed by Qarshi Research International, accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 and an ILAC member, between 28 November and 8 December 2025. Lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium all came back not detected by AOAC 999.10/11. Fulvic acid measured 35 g/100g by titration. Solubility in water measured 97.2 g/100g, gravimetric. The document sits on our lab tests page and you’re welcome to hold anyone else’s up next to it.
Hold onto that solubility figure when you read complaints about resin that wouldn’t dissolve. Real resin softens in warm water and mostly goes into solution. A jar that stays a lump has something else going on.
Fulvic acid numbers deserve the same suspicion. Genuine raw resin usually measures between 15 and 35 per cent depending on the assay, so a label claiming 60 or 80 per cent is either describing a standardised extract or using a method nobody has named. Independent testing in the US found fulvic acid per serving ranging from under 7 mg to over 2 200 mg across shilajit products. So treat a big fulvic number with no method printed beside it as a marketing decision rather than a result.
The research is thinner than the marketing. Most trials with positive results used a standardised extract called PrimaVie rather than raw resin, the samples are small, and some of the work was funded by manufacturers. A 2026 open-label pilot in Cureus gave resin to 25 healthy young men for 28 days and reported improvements in strength and fatigue, with testosterone unchanged. That last detail goes missing from almost every advert you’ll see. We’d rather hand it to you now than have you find it later and wonder what else we left out.
We’re not on a pharmacy shelf. We sell direct, and about 23 independent shops keep the jars on their counters, listed on our stockists page. Delivery is free nationwide, tracked, usually 1 to 3 working days, and PayFast handles cards and Instant EFT. Our Google rating is 4.9, which proves considerably less than the certificate does.
An opinion you’re free to reject: given a bigger jar with no paperwork and a smaller jar with a certificate, take the certificate every time, even when the certificate belongs to somebody other than us. Price per gram matters. Knowing what’s in the gram matters more.
It’s usually a real supplement from a registered supplier with proper import paperwork, and that isn’t nothing. What the shelf can’t tell you is which lab tested that batch and for which metals. Ask the brand directly for the certificate. If one exists, it arrives fast.
The payment and the delivery are as safe as any large online retailer here, so the variable is the seller behind the listing rather than the platform. Check whether the retailer or a third party is selling it, then read the one-star reviews before the five-star ones. If the listing’s changed hands recently, treat the older reviews as being about a different product.
Retail markup, small jar sizes and import costs, mostly. A 15 g jar priced at the top of the range works out near R46 a gram, close to double the R25 a gram on our 40 g jar. Small jars flatter the sticker price and punish the arithmetic.
No. Retail buyers check business paperwork, labelling and traceability, not chemistry. Testing is something a brand chooses to do and then chooses to publish, and you can spot the difference in ten seconds. A real certificate carries a batch number, a lab name, a date and a method beside every result.
Four things. The price per gram rather than the sticker. A batch-numbered certificate with the lab named on it. The lowest-rated reviews. And the name of the seller behind the listing, which is often nothing like the name on the website.
Ask for the certificate. Pharmacy, marketplace or brand site including ours, message the seller for the batch-numbered certificate of analysis and give them a day. What comes back, or doesn’t, settles the decision faster than any review section. Ours has been up for months: batch 250915, methods beside every number, attached to the 40 g jar at R999 that lasts about 100 days at a pea-sized dose.
A complementary product, not a medicine. Pregnant or breastfeeding women, and anyone on chronic medication, should speak to a health professional first.
We publish the full laboratory report for the batch shipping now, with the method named beside every result. Read it in full.
See the certificate
PurePharm