This is an open letter from the owners of DistriNode South Africa. We are publishing it because we would rather answer every question in public, in full and in one place, than let a handful of one-star reviews speak for a business that thousands of customers have used successfully.

Everything written here is checkable, and we invite you to check it. If you disagree with any part of it, the comment section at the bottom of this page is open. So are our inboxes, including the owner's. We answer every single message.

We reply to every review, publicly, with evidence

We have a simple internal rule: no negative review is ever left unanswered. Not one. Whether it is on Google, Trustpilot, HelloPeter or anywhere else, we reply in public, we attach the evidence, and where we were wrong we say so and we fix it.

That evidence is not vague. It is order numbers, timestamps, tracking records, courier waybills, email threads and screenshots. When someone writes that we took their money and sent nothing, we can show, line by line, what was ordered, when it shipped, which courier carried it, and when it was delivered or refunded.

We keep doing this even when a reviewer refuses to speak to us, refuses a goodwill gesture, and answers with insults. That is fine. The reply is not really for that one person. It is for you, the person reading the reviews before deciding whether to trust us.

Who we actually are

DistriNode South Africa is part of the ITwork brand group, which has been trading in Europe for over ten years. The group runs nine online stores across Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Germany, Poland and South Africa, and has accumulated thousands of positive reviews across platforms in those markets over a decade.

We are not a website that appeared last month and will disappear next month. We are a European retail group that opened a South African operation, hired South African staff, and is now investing in physical premises here.

Why our prices are lower, and why delivery takes longer

This is the single most important thing to understand about us, and honestly it explains most of the frustration in our negative reviews.

We work with more than 70 official distributors around the world. When you order from us, in most cases the item is not sitting on a shelf in Johannesburg. It is consolidated from a distributor abroad, flown or shipped in, cleared, and then couriered to you locally. That chain is why a product can cost you dramatically less than the local retail price, and it is also why it takes longer than a local warehouse would.

That is the trade-off, and we state it openly: you wait longer, and in exchange you save real money — often thousands of rands on a single item — and you earn cash back on top. If that trade-off does not suit you, a local retailer with stock on hand is the right choice, and we will say so ourselves. If it does suit you, we are very hard to beat on price.

DistriNode incoming shipment being unpacked and checked
An incoming consolidated shipment being opened and checked in. Every item is matched to its order before it goes to the courier.

Delivery dates are published before you pay, not after

We are told in reviews that we "hide" delivery times. We would like to be very precise about this, because it is easy to verify in about thirty seconds:

  • The expected delivery window is displayed on the product page, before you add anything to the cart.
  • It is displayed again at checkout, before you pay.
  • Once the order is placed, the status is updated as it moves, and you can follow it in a detailed tracking system.
  • When something is delayed, we update the order and we contact you. We do not go quiet.

Do shipments sometimes run a few days late? Yes. International freight, customs and airline capacity are not perfectly predictable, and we will never pretend otherwise. But a delay that we announce, track and explain is a delay, not a scam.

We have never taken a customer's money and kept it

Let us put this as plainly as we can. In the entire history of this business, there is no customer who paid us and received neither the product nor their money back. Not one.

Either you get the goods, or you get your money. There is no third option. If an item cannot be sourced, if a supplier fails us, if a shipment is lost, the refund is ours to carry, not yours. That is the whole policy, and every customer who has ever asked us to honour it can confirm that we did.

Pay on Arrival: you do not have to pay us up front

Here is the part we wish more reviewers would consider before typing the word "scam".

We offer Pay on Arrival. You can place your order, wait for the goods to physically land in Johannesburg, and pay then. We do not demand full payment up front to start the process.

So ask the obvious question: what kind of scammer offers to be paid only after the goods have arrived in the country? Fraud requires the money first. Our entire model is built the other way around, precisely because we know we are asking new customers to trust an import chain they cannot see.

Johannesburg and Cape Town stores are opening

We are opening physical stores in Johannesburg and Cape Town this year. We are bringing in hundreds of items to hold as stock on hand, so that customers who do not want to wait for an import can walk in, look at a product, buy it and take it home the same day.

You will be able to stand in the room, meet the people who answer your emails, and hand back anything you are not happy with. We think that will settle a lot of arguments faster than any review reply ever could.

These are real shipments, arriving every week

Rather than describe it, here are photographs and video taken in our own facilities, of real consignments being received, checked and prepared for local courier delivery.

Consolidated shipment box with networking, storage and power products Incoming stock being received at the DistriNode facility Customer orders picked and labelled for courier dispatch Graphics cards and accessories checked in against customer orders Smartphones, wearables and accessories ready for local delivery Order labelled with its internal order number before dispatch Mixed consignment of IT and consumer electronics being processed

Every yellow label you can see in those photographs is a real customer order number, matched to the item before it leaves us.

On the claim that we are "not an authorised reseller"

This one deserves a direct answer, because it is the accusation most likely to worry a buyer.

We source through more than 70 official distributors worldwide, and our catalogue of over 3 000 brands is imported automatically from those official distributor feeds. That is how a catalogue of this size exists at all: it is distributor data, not a market stall.

We also take brand-authorisation questions seriously, and we can prove it. When one brand approached us formally, with a proper letter and documentation of its authority, we removed every one of its products immediately. No argument, no delay. That is the correct process, and we will follow it every time.

What is not the correct process is an anonymous one-star review asserting that we are unauthorised, with no documents attached and no prior contact. No professional brand protects its distribution that way. If you represent a brand and you have a genuine concern, email us or message us on WhatsApp with the authority documentation and we will review it properly, in writing, the same way we did before.

Yes, we make mistakes. Here is what we do about them.

We are not going to sit here and claim we are flawless. We have shipped the wrong waybill reference. We have been slower to answer than we should have been. We have had orders where the supplier let us down and the customer paid for it in waiting time. Those complaints are fair, and when we get one we do not argue with it.

What we do is fix the specific order, and then fix the process so it stops happening. A large part of the growth we have had this year has gone straight back into exactly that: better tracking, faster status updates, one-click courier labelling, more staff, and now physical stores.

The part we genuinely do not understand

We will be honest about our confusion, too.

Our order volumes and shipments are growing at a pace we did not expect. Customers order from us, receive their goods, save money, and order again. And yet a small number of reviews are relentlessly hostile in a way that does not match what we see in our own order data or in the daily conversations we have with customers.

We do not know whether that is frustration that boiled over, a misunderstanding of the import model, or something less innocent. We are not going to speculate in public about who is behind any particular review. What we will do is keep answering all of them, with evidence, every time.

And to be very clear: we are not satisfied with our review scores, and we are going to fix them — not by hiding anything, but by being faster, clearer and easier to reach than any reason to complain.

If you know us, a review is the biggest support you can give us — and we will send you a gift for it

A young company lives or dies on what people say about it in public. Right now the loudest voices in our review profiles are a small number of very unhappy ones, while the thousands of orders that arrived exactly as promised are silent. If you have bought from us, or you simply know our brand and our group, one honest review changes that balance more than anything we could write ourselves.

So we are going to say thank you properly. Leave us an honest review on any of the platforms below, send us a screenshot, and we will ship you a free gift from our own warehouse — free delivery included, dispatched within 1–2 business days.

Please be honest. We are not asking for five stars and we are not asking anyone to write something they do not mean. Say exactly what your experience was, including what went wrong. The gift is for taking the time to help us, not for the rating you give.

Step 1 — Leave your review on any of these

Step 2 — Pick your gift

One gift per person, while stocks last:

  • Trust Spotlight Pro Webcam — Full HD webcam with a built-in LED light, made for calls and streaming.
  • Halyx Aluminium USB-C to 4-Port USB-A 3.2 Hub — turns a single USB-C port into four fast USB-A ports.
  • Innovation IT Full Desk Mouse Pad, 900 × 400 mm (black) — extra-large mat covering keyboard and mouse.

Step 3 — Send us a screenshot

Email a screenshot of your review to [email protected] and tell us which gift you would like and where to send it. That is genuinely all we need — no order number required, no forms, no conditions. We ship it free of charge, and we ship it immediately.

If you know this group and you want to support it, this is the simplest way to do it, and we will be very grateful. Thank you.

The rest of our group

DistriNode South Africa does not stand alone. If you would like to see the scale of what sits behind this website, or you are shopping from Europe, these are our other stores — same group, same people, same catalogue engine:

Those European stores carry a decade of trading history and thousands of customer reviews between them. They are public, they are checkable, and they are run by the same team that answers your emails here.

Ask us anything, right here

This post exists so that questions have somewhere to go. Ask anything in the comments below — about an order, about our pricing, about the import process, about authorisation, about the new stores, about a review you have read. We will answer all of them publicly, including the uncomfortable ones.

Escalate to a human, including the owner

If you have an open problem right now, you do not need to leave a review to get our attention. Write to any of these addresses and we will resolve it, or tell you exactly when we will:

Any issue raised at these addresses is dealt with on the same business day. That includes escalations that come to the owner personally.

Thank you to every customer who has ordered from us, waited patiently for an import, and come back to order again. You are the reason this business is growing, and you are the reason we are putting stock and staff on the ground in Johannesburg and Cape Town. We intend to earn the rest of the trust the same way: in public, with evidence, one order at a time.

— The owners, DistriNode South Africa