E-Commerce in India - Players review based on my Personal Experiences

E-Commerce has come a long way in last few years in India. From the days, few years ago when Flipkart and eBay were the prime players, entry of Amazon around a year back and a large number of small to medium size players have also been helping shape the industry and customer experiences.

I had shared my earlier E-Commerce Website Experiences since 2012 through various posts including the summary post.  I have continued to shop online for my home shopping needs from clothes to electronics, also I am an active user of bill payment services and now thought of sharing my recent experiences and my feedback.

Amazon has been giving a tough competition to both Flipkart and eBay. Snapdeal, HomeShop18 have also been growing. Specialty Fashion portals like Jabong and Myntra (acquired by Flipkart earlier in year 2014), grocery sites like BigBasket.com also have been doing brisk business by offering convenience of delivery of products at doorstep.

There is also online presence by Brick and Mortar stores like ezone and Croma which some times offer good deals on products.

Overall experience have been reasonably positive dealing with most of these sites and I did not have any horrifying experience like I had earlier with  Letsbuy.com when they delivered my a used LED TV.

Primarily I shop on Amazon, Flipkart and eBay. All three are currently a platform for thousands of sellers to sell their products. Flipkart sells and promotes products listed by their subsidiary WS Retail, which they list as one of the sellers.

Experience incident from Flipkart

Experience with Flipkart has been good with products purchased from their own selling subsidiary WS Retail. They also have one or two days guaranteed delivery option with certain products in large cities. In February 2014 I had ordered Moto G phone with a guaranteed delivery option and when it got delayed by a day they refunded me double the amount of Rs99 they had charged for expedited delivery (total of Rs99x3 refunded including amount I had paid). To my surprise after few days they also sent a sorry card along with a free Bluetooth headset as a goodwill gesture. I had not experienced such customer service in India at least. That is what is called causing delight to customer even when one of the commitments was not met.

Experience incident from Amazon

Experience with Amazon India has been good and they over last one year have given touch competition to Flipkart and other retailers. Items I purchased from Amazon include books, clothes, sporting goods, electronics and electrical items. Although they all have been sold by different sellers but "fullfilled by Amazon" and they have done well in terms of delivery in good condition within committed timelines. 

Blackberry Curve Series Phone - BB Curve 8520 after a year plus of ownership. Poor Product and Service from Blackberry India.

My first mobile phone was a Philips phone in 1998 which were followed through the years by many phones from Nokia, Sony Ericson, LG, Samsung and then around 1.5 year back a Blackberry. Blackberry usage experience has been good but the handset itself is a bad experience in terms of reliability and usable life. Never seen a phone or its parts falling apart the way this Blackberry handset did.

Blackberry was out of compulsion to access corporate emails and I settled for the modest BB Curve 8520 which was purchased through the service provider Airtel. The phone felt robust in hand had a good keyboard, dedicated music buttons, rubberized grip around the phone, couple of buttons which can be customized and had decent features and easy to use.

After around 8 months of use the rubber parts on the body started feeling rough and grainy and I thought this is regular wear and tear. After few months I started seeing few cracks on it and eventually over next few months there were more of these. After a year or so the rubber material buttons started cracking and one fine day when I tried to press a button on side to turn on the data connection there was no button. The button (which is actually just part of the molded rubber part of the body) had just cracked and fallen some where. Over next week one by one all the buttons even the ones rarely used and rubber around the buttons had just vanished.

To my surprise in my office when I looked at BB curve phones used by others many of them had faced same problem and any one having a phone for more than a year typically had buttons on their phone missing. Many even had the buttons on top (three music/mute buttons) missing. Problem with missing button, you can not control volume and many other features of the phone and also water and dust can easily go inside and phone looks ugly.

See 2 buttons of right side gone and upper volume button in process of cracking and next one shows button gone.Left side one button also gone missing.

And now the Blackberry Service in India. 

When I called service center in Bangalore I was told body etc are not covered specially when it is one year old and out of warranty. I posted a message to BB India through twitter and then said they can look into it. I also posted few pictures for them to look at and informed the fact that it is not only me and many other users who have problem and it is a design issue with the kind of material and button design being used in the Curve series of phones. BB India informed that their service partner Redington will get in touch and fix problem for me.

Redington after few followups informed me they will cosmetic upgrade (change the body) on my phone in coming days but after few days informed that phone is not sold through their channel and they can not do any thing about it and will tell BB India the same. On reminding BB again they mentioned contact the service provider. They communicate through Twitter direct message and never have really looked into the issue seriously. Curve has been one of the best sellers for Blackberry but so many users have this problem due to bad design and poor choice of material. They continue to sell Curve series of phones with this design and even the newly launched model Curve 9220 uses similar rubberized button design.

Letsbuy.com Review - Delivered an old Samsung LED TV - New unit delivered now.

After being in touch with Letsbuy.com team, they have helped resolve my issue of old TV delivery. They have promised that Letsbuy.com is strengthening their processes to ensure such incidents don't repeat. Today morning (1st Nov 2011) a  fresh new TV with manufacturing date of Oct 2011 with 0 hours of usage history was delivered. Will update my original post on delivery of old used Samsung LED UA32D5900 TV with new pictures. My other item in order Samsung BlueRay player BD-D5100 was also delivered but has a problem right out of the box. Its drive is making loud sounds when turned on. This is a new piece with Samsung's manufacturing defect but I have reported it to Letsbuy for a replacement.

I am hoping for many other customers who continue to report issues with Letsbuy (Mouthshut letsbuy review page), their issues also get resolved. 

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Update 8 Nov. 2011.

I noted another customer of Letsbuy.com, Vikas complaining about they sending a used Plasma TV. You can see his review on Mouthshut.

http://www.mouthshut.com/review/Letsbuy-com-review-rpopplotnn

- Neeraj