Business17.02.2015

South Africa’s online shops tested

MyBroadband recently published two articles ranking South Africa’s online shops. These two articles were based on opinions, and we decided to go one step further and test these shops objectively.

For the test we selected prominent online shops in SA which sell technology products: Takealot, HiFi Corp, Kalahari, Raru, Incredible Connection, Dion Wired, and Makro.

We selected an item which was offered by all the online retailers – a Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch portable hard drive – and selected equitable delivery options.

The results of this test are divided into three sections: price, user friendliness, and delivery time.

Price

The price of the Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch portable drive varied significantly between the different retailers.

While some retailers offered free delivery, others charged a small fee for fast delivery.

Online shopping pricing comparison
Shop	Product	Basic price	Delivery cost	Total cost
Takealot	Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch drive	R997	Free	R997
Kalahari	Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch drive	R1,046	Free	R1,046
Makro	Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch drive	R999	R55	R1,054
Raru	Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch drive	R1,194	Free	R1,194
HiFi Corp	Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch drive	R1,200	R56	R1,256
Dion Wired	Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch drive	R1,200	R60	R1,260
Incredible Connection	Seagate 1TB 2.5-inch drive	R1,249	R150	R1,399

User friendliness

Most of the online shopping portals were user friendly and pleasant to use when making a purchase.

The exceptions were Incredible Connection and HiFi Corp, whose registration and checkout processes were tedious and time consuming.

Online shopping website comparison
Shop	Website usability	Payment
Kalahari	Excellent	Excellent
Makro	Excellent	Excellent
Raru	Excellent	Excellent
Dion Wired	Excellent	Excellent
Takealot	Excellent	Good
HiFi Corp	Poor	Excellent
Incredible Connection	Poor	Excellent

Delivery times

MyBroadband ordered all the products around the same time on 10 February 2015.

The delivery times differed quite a bit between the various online shops we used, as shown in the table below.

Online shopping delivery time
Shop	Ordered	Delivered	Delivery time
Incredible Connection	10 February 12:30	11 February 09:38	21 hours
Takealot	10 February 12:30	11 February 10:55	23.5 hours
HiFi Corp	10 February 12:30	11 February 10:55	23.5 hours
Raru	10 February 12:30	12 February 10:53	46.5 hours
Makro	10 February 12:30	12 February 15:28	51 hours
Dion Wired	10 February 12:30	12 February 15:28	51 hours
Kalahari	10 February 12:30	18 February 10:43	7 days, 22 hours