Utterly Disgusted in Takealot.com Seller Marketplace

First of all I am not rating Takealot.com I am rating the Takealot.com sellers eCommerce Marketplace where suppliers supply to Takealot. If you have an ecommerce business and are think of supplying/selling on takealot you NEED to read this.

I am so angry and disgusted with this Takealot Service, and it is very sad because I lost all my respect for the great and successful South African Business.

I started selling on Takealot about 4 months ago. The first month was great, but from there on, only problems. So the seller supplies in advance and only gets payment of sold items every 7 days. So this in itself is already a burden on a supplier's/seller's cash flow. So what happened with me is a lot of clients cancelled their purchases so takealot informed me and I received back my stock, just to find out that the item's seals have been broken or packaging have been torn. HOW can takealot accept returns like this, and then expect us the suppliers/sellers to accept such returns. I now have to sell that stock as second hand and I am not even a second hand retailer. Surely they must have quality procedures in place to avoid these kind of things. To put the cherry on top when you query this they only reimburse 0%-5% of the selling price to you and say that they make provision for this in their T's and C's. With this I was still patient but then I received back 3 highly prices items which clients have cancelled. Upon receiving them I already knew I had to inspect them. Here is what I found:

First of all, the package seals of all the items I have received back have been broken, whether this was done by the clients or the warehouse I am not sure.

Here are the items with the order ID's and the return references.

RRN-3bfb-b5ef (Order: ********** 3) - This is a Fibre Router. The package seal have been broken and sellotape have been put over to keep the box from opening. Upon my inspection I found that the packaging of the antennas of the router have been torn.

RRN-07b0-27d1 (Order: ********** 4) - This is a gaming keyboard. The seal have been broken and a sticker with label "Fragile" have been sticked over the broken seal to cover the broken seal. I carefully removed the sticker as my supplier informed me that this is not their sticker. Upon the removal I found the broken seal. Furthermore I inspected the product and opened the contents. I found that the packaging inside have been torn and one of the keyboard keys was out of its socket rolling loose within the packaging.

RRN-37e5-7fac (Order: ********** 2) - This is a projector. Once again the seal have been broken and sellotape have been sticked over to cover up the broken seal. I inspected the contents and found that packaging inside have been torn. I inspected further and found something very unacceptable. The projector comes with 3 small ***** in stands. Two of them are missing and not even within the package contents. How am I supposed to sell this to my customers.

I only have an ecommerce business so I do not have a brick and mortar store but I am sitting with this stock issues now.

After I inspected these products I once again queried it with the takealot team and their reply to me was:

"Oct 3, 10:44 SAST

Dear Seller,

Thank you for your email.

We're sorry to hear about the packaging . We do encounter situations where we do incorrectly accept returns.

We have made provisions for this in addition to our T's & C's. Please refer to out SLA schedule.

In cases where packaging is damaged we will reimburse between 0 - 5% of the product price.

We sincerely suggest that this is taken into consideration when listing items. This would be considered as part of the risk profile when selling goods on the takealot.com ecommerce environment.

Thank you for selling on takealot.com

Kind Regards"

So there you have it, Takalot does not see their suppliers as important, they only care about their clients and that is it. They are a big business so why should they care. My small business is suffering because of their actions. To top it all off I yet again received a cancellation for a 7" Tablet. My product was the exact product on the takealot site and everything on my part was correct. The client cancelled because according to him/her the tablet was not 7" and yet again takealot accepted this return and I must accept back an opened box and used tablet.

This is utterly disgusting and I hope the CEO or whoever is in charge will come across this post.

DO NOT SELL ON TAKELAOT!!!! TAKEALOT you have dissappointed me!!