Black Friday South Africa when and where good deals

Black Friday 2018: Takealot called out for increasing prices during checkout

Black Friday is starting to take its toll with queues growing in stores and websites buckling under the strain.

Black Friday South Africa when and where good deals

The retailer is under attack at the moment from netizens who claim that the “specials” on the site change back to full price when they try to check out. One Twitter user, Ashlyn Helleberg, said

“It reverts in less than an hour, when I tried to order it again it back on full price. What kind of Black Friday is this, we were not told it will be on sale for a limited time, I mean is not for the whole of Friday???!”

Another user, Danie van der Merwe, noted that the Huawei Mate 29 was listed as R7,999 on Takelot when the specials went live at 00:00. The price went up to R8,499 this morning and is currently on R8,999. 

Chief Marketing Officer at Takealot, Julie-Anne Walsh, explained why this was the case: 

As with all promotions, a limited number of units are made available at the sale price. It is possible for discounted stock to sell out between the time that it takes for customers to add it to their shopping basket and check-out. In this instance, the product returns to its original list price.

Takealot did, after all, receive a record number of visitors to their site during 2018’s Black Friday, so it should be no surprise that stock sold out so fast. Walsh confirmed that the Blue Dot Sale sale will continue through the weekend into Cyber Monday and Takealot Tuesday. Hundreds of new deals will be added daily. 

At the time of writing, both the app and website were still giving clients hassle. Others were remarking that Takealot is taking too long to reply to queries. 

Nevertheless, the situation does seem a bit more stable this year, and while it hasn’t been the smoothest sailing, most big companies are sailing around their obstacles with a bit more ease this time around. 

Takealot had to disable credit card payments on their website as most transactions were accompanied by that pesky “an error occurred” message after users added their credit card details. So close to checking out, yet so far! Customers, however, had no reason for worry as the Takealot team worked through the transactions manually to allocate payments.

The retail giant advised clients to use other payment options at the meantime, such as Instant EFT via i-pay while they were waiting for their payment partner to restore service. 

Also Read: Black Friday 2018: Best deals, site crashes and chaos