{"id":467617,"date":"2022-11-04T13:56:17","date_gmt":"2022-11-04T11:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=467617"},"modified":"2022-11-04T14:13:55","modified_gmt":"2022-11-04T12:13:55","slug":"raru-stops-taking-orders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/gaming\/467617-raru-stops-taking-orders.html","title":{"rendered":"Raru stops taking orders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Online retailer Raru is no longer taking orders, according to a notice on its website.<\/p>\n

Its closure follows months of customer complaints that orders were not being delivered on time and refunds weren\u2019t being processed on time.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

According to reports<\/a><\/strong> on the complaints website Hello Peter, unhappy customers took to filing takedown requests with the Internet Service Providers\u2019 Association of South Africa.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On 4 November 2022, the Raru website displayed the following notice:<\/p>\n

Due to unfortunate circumstances we have no choice but to stop taking orders.<\/p>\n

More information will be provided in due course.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was not possible to log in to track outstanding orders or returns.<\/p>\n

In addition to Raru, the company\u2019s long-standing online web forum SAGamer also appears to have been shut down.<\/p>\n

Attempting to access the board displays the message, \u201cThis site unavailable.\u201d<\/p>\n

MyBroadband contacted Raru director and co-founder Waine Smith for comment, but he did not respond by the time of publication.<\/p>\n

Seeing Raru in dire straits is a sad day for ecommerce in South Africa. The company was one of the country\u2019s most established players, founded by industry veterans.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Before Raru, Neil Smith, Waine Smith, and Jose Pereira had cofounded Take 2, which would ultimately become Takealot.<\/p>\n

They sold Take 2\u00a0to Tiger Global and Kim Reid in 2011, who rebranded the online store<\/strong><\/a> after the deal closed.<\/p>\n

As part of the sale, the founders agreed to stay out of South African ecommerce for three years.<\/p>\n

They also struck a bargain to exclude their online gaming community,\u00a0SAGamer\u00a0(originally PS3ZA), from the deal with Tiger Global and Reid.<\/p>\n

During their three-year restraint of trade period, they focused on growing SAGamer to give them a platform from which to\u00a0launch Raru in 2014.<\/p>\n

According to Companies and Intellectual Property Commission records, Pereira resigned as director on 10 June 2021.<\/p>\n

\n

Now read: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hiring in South Africa \u2014 including IT internships<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just weeks before Black Friday, Raru has stopped taking orders and shut down its long-standing gaming forum SAGamer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":467621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[35,35322,25321,82485,82061],"class_list":["post-467617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-gaming","tag-headline","tag-neil-smith","tag-raru","tag-sagamer","tag-waine-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467623,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467617\/revisions\/467623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}