Best online tech stores in South Africa

South Africans will find no shortage of capable online retailers specialising in selling tech products.

Numerous sites offer smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables, smart home products, sound equipment, security cameras, and all manner of purpose-specific gadgets.

Finding one of these stores is as simple as searching for an online tech or electronics store in South Africa on Google.

But seasoned shoppers will know you always risk losing your money if you buy from a scam shop or get bad after-sales service from less effective operators.

Even with all their optimisations and anti-fraud measures, online advertisers and search engines can show ads for fraudulent players or rank them relatively high in their results.

Fortunately, platforms like Google, Facebook, and Hellopeter offer user-generated review systems.

While these should not be the only mechanisms through which to identify whether a shop is legitimate, they can help separate the wheat from the chaff.

MyBroadband recently compared the highest-rated online computer shops in the country and conducted a similar analysis of general online electronics stores.

This time, we looked at shops offering a broader range of tech and gadgets that extended well beyond PC components.

To be considered in the comparison, stores must have a minimum rating of 4.0 out of 5.0 on Google and Hellopeter.

That already disqualified larger stores like Takealot, Everyshop, Makro, and Loot.

Aside from their comparatively poor ratings, these stores offer a much wider range of goods, which means not all their reviews are related to tech products.

To trim the list further, we only considered stores with 100 or more reviews on either Google or Hellopeter.

That left us with seven stores, for which we have summarised Google, Facebook, and Hellopeter ratings in the table below.

Unless indicated otherwise, the scores are out of five.

For each of the stores, we calculated two average ratings.

Firstly, we determined a “pure” average from the ratings on each website, each of which had equal weighting.

Secondly, we added a score out of 2.5 based on the number of reviews the stores had compared to the shop with the highest number.

We used 2.5 instead of 5.0 for this weighting to ensure it would not disproportionately favour bigger players, but also still grant them their fair due for drawing lots of customers and getting a high proportion of positive reviews.

Romtech had the highest pure average, but it is important to note that it did not have any Facebook reviews and only had ten reviews on Hellopeter.

Tech Guy SA was the second-best in terms of pure averages, also achieving full marks when rounding up.

Contributing to this was an impressive 5.0 rating on Hellopeter, which tends to be the website with the most critical customer feedback.

In third place was tech.co.za, with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5. Most of its reviews were on Google, where it achieved a perfect score.

Weighing the number of reviews

When weighing the ratings according to the number of reviews, Futurama came out on top — with an average of 4.6

It was followed by tech.co.za and Tech Guy SA — with average scores of 4.4 and 4.3 out of 5, respectively.

When taking Romtech’s total review number into account, it achieved an adjusted rating of 4.1/5, tying for 5th place with Technomobi.

Nevertheless, consumers are more likely to use Hellopeter for negative reviews, so the fact that it had full marks on that site is commendable.

While we have gone to the trouble of comparing these stores’ ratings, their mere inclusion in this comparison should indicate that they will offer solid service.

It should be emphasised that more prominent players like Takealot, JD Group’s Everyshop, and Makro are still good options if you don’t necessarily require tech specialists.

They have extensive selections of tech products, established logistics networks, and serve substantial customer bases.

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