Non existent customer support

I have been fighting with takealot.com and Dell computers since April 2020 to organise a refund of a computer that was purchased through them in late October 2019.

At the end of March 2020, just before lockdown was due to commence, the laptop suffered several critical failures which I can only determine as being a manufacturer fault as this was my work computer and had no cause to missuse it. Therefore I was still within my consumer rights to request a refund based on defective goods.

Needless to say it has now been almost 3 months and this issue has yet to be resolved. I have been in touch with no less than 6 customer service staff through takealot, all of which are glorified human robots who hide behind takealot's terms and conditions regarding direct warranties with certain suppliers such as Dell. Every single one of these support agents claims that it is now up to me to contact Dell regarding a refund, even though they wasted months of my time accepting my logged return, only to decline it once it arrived at their collection point.

The problem here is that Dell's customer support staff is either completely unresponsive to phone calls, or their email support claims that they don't deal with the end user. I believe that at this point, takealot should take at least some responsibility as they are basically passing their responsibility as a seller onto the customer, a responsibility that no customer should have to deal with when their suppliers clearly have no intention of fulfilling these "direct warranty" responsibilities.

This laptop was essential to my business, and the loss of it also resulted in the loss of irreplaceable personal data and business opportunities. Unfortunately, takealot is more than happy to take a lot of your money but they won't take even the slightest bit of responsibility, they will gladly contravene you consumer rights, and once they have your money, will do everything in their power to avoid fullfilling their obligations as a goods and services provider.

I am not in a position to take any legal action against takealot nor Dell, I simply do not have the means, and their attitude towards customers has broken my spirit.

I warn anybody who may consider buying anything from takealot.com to clearly read the description of the goods you intend to buy - if it claims to be covered by a direct warranty, I recommend you avoid buying these goods from takealot. Especially in the case of any electronic goods, consider the purchase voetstoets as you will likely be unable to get a refund without signing a blood pact with Satan himself.