Raru stops taking orders

Online retailer Raru is no longer taking orders, according to a notice on its website.
Its closure follows months of customer complaints that orders were not being delivered on time and refunds weren’t being processed on time.
Raru also experienced an eight-hour outage on 24 October, leading to speculation that it had not paid its hosting bill or ran afoul of a takedown notice.
According to reports on the complaints website Hello Peter, unhappy customers took to filing takedown requests with the Internet Service Providers’ Association of South Africa.
When queried about the outage at the time, Raru director and co-founder Waine Smith only said that they had logged the problem with their host and were waiting for feedback.
According to Smith, the site had gone down at 09:00 and by 14:45 they were still waiting for a response from their hosting provider.
On 4 November 2022, the Raru website displayed the following notice:
Due to unfortunate circumstances we have no choice but to stop taking orders.
More information will be provided in due course.
It was not possible to log in to track outstanding orders or returns.
In addition to Raru, the company’s long-standing online web forum SAGamer also appears to have been shut down.
Attempting to access the board displays the message, “This site unavailable.”
MyBroadband contacted Raru director and co-founder Waine Smith for comment, but he did not respond by the time of publication.
Seeing Raru in dire straits is a sad day for ecommerce in South Africa. The company was one of the country’s most established players, founded by industry veterans.
Before Raru, Neil Smith, Waine Smith, and Jose Pereira had cofounded Take 2, which would ultimately become Takealot.
They sold Take 2 to Tiger Global and Kim Reid in 2011, who rebranded the online store after the deal closed.
As part of the sale, the founders agreed to stay out of South African ecommerce for three years.
They also struck a bargain to exclude their online gaming community, SAGamer (originally PS3ZA), from the deal with Tiger Global and Reid.
During their three-year restraint of trade period, they focused on growing SAGamer to give them a platform from which to launch Raru in 2014.
According to Companies and Intellectual Property Commission records, Pereira resigned as director on 10 June 2021.