Continued poor customer service from iStore South Africa

I initiated the upgrade process of my company cellphone contract on the 2nd of October 2025 and decided to make use of the iStore South Africa online upgrade service.

The online upgrade user interface where the ID documents for the directors of the company are uploaded for the application does not allow more than 3 documents to be uploaded so since this contract is in name of my employer, there are 7 directors, so 7 ID's that are supposed to be uploaded? I submitted my application with only three of the seven ID uploaded. I received a follow-up e-mail on the 14th of October 2025 from *** where he requested me to send the ID's of the 4 other directors that I could not upload during the online application, which I sent to him on the same day - 14th of October 2025. I received another follow-up e-mail from *** stating the following: "Our Compliance Department requires a clear photo of the ID taken using a smartphone. The attached scanned copies are unfortunately not clear enough for verification purposes." I had to obtain these "clear photos of the ID's taken using a smartphone" from our 7 directors across South Africa and submitted them as requested on the 17th of October 2025. I received an e-mail from *** on the 22nd of October 2025 stating; "Update: Your contract application has been approved", which also requested me to make payment of R250 for the contract upgrade fee, which I made on the same day via the iStore South Africa website. I also responded to the email from *** confirming I have made the requested payment. I never had any feedback after that and sent a follow-up mail to *** requesting feedback on the 3rd of November 2025. Again, I received no response from Bontle, so today (5th of November 2025) I phoned the iStore SA customer care number to find out why this upgrade process is taking so long and why I have not received any feedback in two weeks after the contract has been approved and I made payment for the contract upgrade fee? The call center operator merely apologized for the delay and stated that the service agent handling my contract upgrade will make contact with me in due course. I subsequently received a call from Bontle Maapola this afternoon, which informed me that there is a shortage in stock of the device for my contract upgrade. I enquired as to why I was requested to make payment of the R250 contract upgrade fee, if no device was available to allocate to my contract upgrade, upon which Bontle responded that it was a mistake made on her part. Bontle apologized and I requested the expected timeline for the availability of stock for the device for my contract upgrade, upon which Bontle responded about 2 to 3 weeks????? It has been more than a month since I initiated this online contract upgrade process and now I am informed that it will probably take another 2 to 3 weeks before this process can be completed???

I have had bad experiences dealing with iStore SA in the past, and my opinion of their poor service only gets worse through further dealings with them.

I will certainly not recommend anyone following the online contract upgrade process with iStore SA.