Shots have been fired.

At times our office resembles a Takealot depot, with parcels coming in and out (mostly for Seth, naturally), but I reckon the folks over at MyBroadband exercise extreme caution with their online shopping.

We can make that educated guess by looking at a story they published earlier today, with the headline “Don’t be fooled by Takealot’s Daily Deals discounts”.

Alright, we’re intrigued, so let’s see what has them so hot under the collar:

To see whether Takealot’s Daily Deals discounts are inflated, MyBroadband investigated the issue.

We selected three tech products from Takealot’s Daily Deals on 5 June 2018, and compared the discounted price with the retail price at competing shops.

What we found was that Takealot’s “deal” prices were higher than the retail price of the same products at other stores.

The table and images below show the results of the investigation.

Your table awaits:

That is rather interesting.

Here’s a side-by-side of those products:

MyBroadband did give Takealot the right of reply, and they stated that they’ve never claimed to have the cheapest prices:

…it never claimed to have the cheapest prices in South Africa, so it is “not misleading at all” to promise large discounts when the products are available for cheaper at other stores.

“Depending on the Daily Deal, it will sometimes be the best-priced in market and sometimes not, but it is a discounted deal price with limited stock available for the day,” said Takealot.

“Our customers can easily shop around as they would in a brick-and-mortar environment, and find the price and retailer that works best for them.”

“Not all consumers shop purely on price, so this is not the only factor in the decision-making process.”

They have a point. I would gladly pay extra for something on Takealot than deal with the shambles that is Loot.

In the MyBroadband comments section there’s a war going on, but I would like to single out this effort for good pun work:

Less enamoured with this one but they give it a good go:

We will finish with the top-rated comment, which I guess is an open letter of sorts:

Anyway, you shop where you see fit.

I’ll remind you that you can win R5 000 in cash here, in case you’re bleak about blowing your money on something that wasn’t as great a discount as you first thought.

[source:mybroadband]