Online shopping in South Africa is definitely on the up with more and more stores offering free delivery and other great specials when purchasing online. But, it is a relatively new concept and a fair amount of shoppers prefer to physically touch the products they plan on spending their hard earned money on. Also, there is the age old fear of credit card fraud and the South African postal service to contend with too. I have been fighting with the post man when it comes to delivering my packages from my online store, but I am very happy and I hate to say it, surprised, to have had a 99% success rate on all my deliveries so far (the 1% being a package I sent to my mom last year which I believe has made its way back to me here in Korea after a rather unfortunate loss of the post mans arrival notification). I have a long term business plan for a nation wide delivery service, just for South Africans, that is fast, reliable and affordable...who wants to invest??? :)
BUT...the postage services are increasing in efficiency, with many online stores choosing to send packages with private services with a more reliable track record and all the shop owners I have spoken to have had no issues whatsoever. Which is good to know as today I want to highlight some of my favourite South African online stores. I haven't shopped at all of these yet as I have been out of the country for a while now, but there are a fair amount of birthdays coming up for my family & friends, I think I will just have to make some purchases soon.
(I had planned to blog about my Top 5 favourite stores and then spent hours scouring the web to fill my last 2 spots, but thanks to all the input from my lovely readers on Facebook, I was able to narrow their loooong list of great recommendations down to 7!).
And here they are, in no particular order:
