Buyers, beware! It’s a ****.

Capetown-Athletic, Summer Cape, Summercape, Fashion Cape, Cape Fashion - all fronts for the same online fashion **** - are going to take your money.

Even though this website references Cape Town or South Africa in its branding and URL, and makes every effort to appear “local” (with a .co.za URL), it is a front for cheap, low-quality imports.

Here's what happened. I saw the items advertised online. Browsed a bit. Forgot about them. Saw them again. Browsed again. Forgot. Third time, put two items into my cart and checked out. Though I found the items to be quite expensive, I felt good about buying local items of relative quality (100% cotton, etc).

Naively, I didn’t check Google, where I would have found hundreds and hundreds of unhappy customers and only when my items arrived (after 6 weeks), did I realise my mistake.

- My “denim” item was not denim but 100% polyester. - None of the items resembled the photos used to advertise. - Both XLs were way too small. Closer to a M - or even a S.

When I emailed the website to request a refund, I was told...

“…please note that all return charges are the customer's liability. Your product will need to be returned directly to our supplier and it will be inspected upon arrival before your refund is processed. Return address: Hunan Province, China…”

I’d really thought I was buying from a business in Cape Town!

I complained again and was told: “Sadly, we can only issue a refund if the product is returned to our supplier directly.”

But I declined to do this, because I was not willing to take the risk of paying for an international return at my own cost, in the likelihood they declined to refund me. So, here we are.

Do not shop with these companies. They are profoundly ****my.