Make Sure You're Being Safe!

A Guide to Buying Online

When Matilda’s opened its virtual ‘doors’ way back in 2005, it was the only purely online adult store in South Africa, and one of only a handful of stores, online or off, where you could choose from a range of adult toys and lingerie.

Since then, the industry has grown hugely in South Africa, and there are brick and mortar stores in most large cities, along with a number of online stores. Most of these stores are reputable, but we’ve come across a couple that bring the rest of us a bad name, so we’d like to share some tips with you about making sure your online shopping is safe. These tips apply to any kind of online shopping, so we hope you’ll find them handy.

1. Shop from sites that have a public presence. Large, reputable stores have advertising campaigns, and are often featured in articles in magazines. They will have a good presence on social media, with regular posts to their Facebook, Twitter and other accounts. Google the site name if you want to check on their internet presence.
2. Check the About Us page and Contact Us details on any website you want to shop from. They should give details about the store, the team who run it, and how to contact them if you have any problems. You may even want to give them a call, to reassure yourself that there are real people waiting to fill your order.
3. Make sure you read the site’s Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy and Returns Policy. If the site doesn’t have any of this information, they’re probably not trustworthy.
4. Wherever possible, shop with sites that offer verified, secure credit card payments, as well as other payment methods.
5. Shop around. If a store seems to have ridiculously low prices compared to all other stores, they may be very big, like Takealot, OR they may be offering extremely low prices to entice shoppers when they don’t intend to actually fulfil the order.
6. Look carefully at customer reviews on the site. Do they seem authentic? We have seen a few sites that had copied reviews from other stores and used them to claim that they had provided great service.

We at Matilda’s are thrilled that so many large and small stores are opening in South Africa. We believe that healthy competition is always good – it keeps all of us on our toes and makes sure we’re always bringing you the best quality products at the best prices.

We also believe that it signals a change in our country, where people are becoming more open about sexuality, and more willing to talk about and work on having a healthy sex life in healthy relationships. That’s something we can always get behind.

But when an industry is growing so fast, there will always be some chancers who try to ‘take the money and run’, so we urge you to make sure you’re shopping safely, online and off. We want your sexy times to be fun from start to finish, and that includes choosing and buying your goodies. Follow our tips and you’ll be off to a great start in your sexy online shopping experience!