Best online tech and gadget shops in South Africa

South Africans have numerous highly-rated online shops at their disposal if their primary interest is buying the latest tech products.

To help choose which stores to consider, MyBroadband determined ratings for nine of South Africa’s most well-known tech and gadgets shops.

To be included in our comparison, an online store must first focus on tech products as its main offering.

Secondly, the shop must have received at least 100 reviews on Facebook, Google, or Hellopeter.

Thirdly, the shop must offer a wide range of tech products — which can include smartphones, tablets, wearables, and computers — but not be focused on one category in particular.

Stores which only offer smartphones, for example, were not considered.

We did not include stores that might also have large electronics catalogues but are most well-known for their brick-and-mortar outlets — like Game, Incredible, HiFi Corp, or Makro — because these stores’ ratings might be based on in-person experiences.

In addition, this analysis did not consider prominent online retailers offering a wide range of products beyond tech — like Takealot and Bash.

This is because many of their reviews may be for non-tech products, like clothing or fragrances.

JD Group’s Everyshop has been included because its offering is much more heavily tech-oriented than other prominent online retailers.

The table below summarises how well each store performed in our comparison. Scores are out of five unless indicated otherwise.

To determine our rankings, we calculated two average ratings for each of the nine stores included in our comparison.

The first was a “pure” average simply calculated from the total score out of 15 when adding the ratings across Facebook, Google, and Hellopeter.

Tech Guy SA had the highest pure average of 4.95 out of 5, primarily thanks to favourable ratings on Hellopeter. It was followed by tech.co.za and Technomobi with ratings of 4.82 and 4.69, respectively.

All the online shops had average ratings higher than 4 out of 5, except for Everyshop, which had a poor rating of 2.46.

Weighted rankings based on review numbers

We also calculated an additional score out of 2.5 for each shop, which was based on the number of reviews they had relative to the store with the highest number.

We opted to use 2.5 instead of 5.0 for this weighting to avoid disproportionately favouring bigger players while also giving them their due for being able to draw plenty of customers and maintaining a high proportion of positive reviews.

This was then added to the total for a rating out of 17.5, which was converted to a percentage-based score.

When we took the number of reviews into consideration, Futurama came out on top, with a weighted average score of 90.17%. Futurama benefitted from the second-highest number of reviews of all the stores.

Tech Guy SA — the top performer when not factoring in review counts — ranked in 2nd place with a weighted average of 87.43%, followed by tech.co.za in 3rd place with 86.34%.

The store with the most reviews — Geewiz — placed in a close fourth with 85.26%. Although its review number of 2,540 was substantially higher than the rest, it was dragged down by a 3.5 out of 5 rating on Facebook.

Overall, the stores we compared posted good weighted scores, with only two below 80%.

Everyshop was also the worst performer in the weighted rankings, with a score of 45.31%, putting it far behind the competition.

It should be emphasised that more prominent players like Takealot, Incredible, and Makro are still good options if you don’t necessarily require tech specialists but want competitive pricing or product selections.

In addition to extensive tech product ranges, they have extensive logistics networks, making them capable of serving customers at scale.