It is increasingly becoming a world view that South Africa's crime rate is on the rise. The question in this instance is whether buying a brick machine from a South African brick-making machine manufacturer is indeed secure. In fact, should anyone from overseas trust ANY South African business? There are two ways to answer this. Crime in South Africa is statistically worse than in practical reality Crime statistics calculate the reported instances spread across the average of the population. This could even be inflated to accommodate unreported crime. What the statistics is not telling you is how the population is spread out & how isolated the crime statistics are. Most of the crime is occurring in the townships. These are the residential areas of poverty-struck low income earners or unemployed individuals. Crime that occurs in an area like this is far removed from a high-income area with walled-housing, police patrols & security companies on-call.
When it comes to financial crime, there are scams occurring all over the world. The major problem is not that you are buying from a well-known company or banking with your bank online, but in fact knowing whether it IS the company you are dealing with, or just some pretender, impersonating a sales representative from the company; Or a fake website that is made to look like your bank. These are the real dangers. You should take a trip to South Africa to see the country - your view will change once you see the dichotomy of 1st world urban areas within the greater 3rd world land.
Deal with companies that have a good reputation Reputation can be acquired a few ways. It can be the number of years a company has been in business practice. It can be the high quality products that you have witnessed or take the word from a colleague. It could be from the perceived professionalism - crooks don't want to spend TOO much money on their scam! Doubell Machines is the perfect example. There is historical evidence of business trading, there are official registration papers, export licencing documents & verification letters from the banking institution. The quality would be word-of-mouth, but if you are the first person in your area to import a machine, you can let the ISO9001-2008 certification by the South African Bureau of Standards vouch for that. The professional manner can be seen not only with our presentation of services & products, but also with our helpful sales team who are ready to assist all international enquiries over all accessible communication mediums. When looking at other South African companies, ask them a few questions to see how far they can assist you.
They should have good insight into their product(s).
They should have familiarity with the process of exporting (naturally a licence to do so also).
They should be able to provide references of other customers who have used their services before, preferably in your area.
They should be available for a physical site visit
They should allow you to send a representative to inspect the goods before final payment is made (as an option to the customer)
Lastly - they should have an email address that is part of their website (ie. not @yahoo or @hotmail or @gmail) - If they expect to do business abroad, they can at least have a registered website with an email address linked to a physically paying company, which provides further credibility.
