Dishonest, unfair and impersonal

Takealot does have the biggest selection of products of any South African online store and they are often, though not always, the cheapest. There's a dark flipside to this, though: their customer support and business practices, in a word, completely suck. I wouldn't bother to write this if it happened once but twice is unforgivable.

The first time I had an issue should really have been warning enough, though, as they did something unbelievably dishonest. I ordered a book from them only to receive notice about a week later that they, unfortunately, had to cancel my order as they were out of stock of that book. Out of curiosity, I searched for the same edition of the same book on their site and, would you know it, it was in stock - it had just gone up in price by something like 250%! They offered some half-assed apology and left it at that.

The second thing, literally just happened. I ordered a laptop table from them and within a week, one of the legs had snapped off at the joint, rendering the device unususable and unfixable. I sent it back to get credit to buy another, hopefully better laptop table at almost double the price but, of course, I got a message saying that they hadn't received the USB cable that came with it so they would not refund me a cent, even in credit. Admittedly, I could have packed the USB cable better (I sadly don't have a bunch of packaging materials lying around at home) so perhaps it was ****** in transit. That doesn't change the fact that a) the damage to the laptop table had nothing whatsoever to do the USB cable, b) they wouldn't even entertain the idea of refunding me the amount minus the R25-R50 (max!) that a USB to USB cable would cost. Nope, I just got another half-assed apology that I'm reasonably sure was just a generic form letter.

I really do hate that they have such a large range of products, otherwise I would recommend customers use only Loot.co.za and Raru.co.za in the future. Such a dishonest company with such terrible customer service does not deserve to be the leader in South African online retailing.