Few years back, when online shopping started, most of us hesitates to buy products online. We all had concerns like:
* The quality of the product being sold there.
* Is the product genuine/original?
* Is our money safe with them?
* Will they ever deliver the product?
* When will we get the product?
As the time moved on, these started gained our confidence and thus online shopping has now become much more prominent. Most of us now feel free to buy stuff online.
But now as we have started buying products online, these companies have started failing on above concerns. I am just not saying out of hindsight. This has happened to myself and my friends many times.
Today again, same thing happened to me. This is the worst experience of online shopping I have come across (and yeah this is what motivated me to ink it down as a blog post.)
This incident happened with an Indian e-commerce website ShopClues.com.
So it started with me getting a SMS regarding their weekly Sunday sale. They call "Sunday Flea Market". I checked it and saw a product named "Cleaning Cloth Set". Since I was in need of this, so I decided to buy this. Placed order. Yay!
I received this product on 9th October. When I saw the packet itself, I was like Seriously is this the packet having 6 pieces of Cleaning cloth(as shown in the image above.)
It was so small that leaving 6 pieces of cloth, I could not imagine putting even a single piece of cleaning cloth in that packet.
Fingers crossed, I opened the packet hoping that they must have used some magic to fit the product in that Lilliput(The Lilliputians are men six inches in height).
On opening it, I was laughing like anything. The product received was not even 1% closer to the product as shown in the ordered product image.
One of my friend suggested me to send an email to ShopClues for this. I was like, now I will have to send a mail to them. Chat with them for hours to get my money back. I was sure, this will not result into anything fruitful and yes I was correct. This is what they sent as a reply:
Such a pathetic serve!
All in all, I wasted hell lot of time for this crap. This leads to too much frustration. Now, at least ShopClues.com has made sure that their will not get any load from one customer.
This is not only limited to one website. Many customers around the country are facing the similar issues. Most of them receive defected products. Most of them receive broken products. More unfortunate people like me receive completely different product. There are even more unfortunate people who do not receive anything on placing an online order.
* The quality of the product being sold there.
* Is the product genuine/original?
* Is our money safe with them?
* Will they ever deliver the product?
* When will we get the product?
As the time moved on, these started gained our confidence and thus online shopping has now become much more prominent. Most of us now feel free to buy stuff online.
But now as we have started buying products online, these companies have started failing on above concerns. I am just not saying out of hindsight. This has happened to myself and my friends many times.
Today again, same thing happened to me. This is the worst experience of online shopping I have come across (and yeah this is what motivated me to ink it down as a blog post.)
This incident happened with an Indian e-commerce website ShopClues.com.
So it started with me getting a SMS regarding their weekly Sunday sale. They call "Sunday Flea Market". I checked it and saw a product named "Cleaning Cloth Set". Since I was in need of this, so I decided to buy this. Placed order. Yay!
I received this product on 9th October. When I saw the packet itself, I was like Seriously is this the packet having 6 pieces of Cleaning cloth(as shown in the image above.)
It was so small that leaving 6 pieces of cloth, I could not imagine putting even a single piece of cleaning cloth in that packet.
On opening it, I was laughing like anything. The product received was not even 1% closer to the product as shown in the ordered product image.
Yes, this is what I have received. I don't know how does this Green paper like thing is same as the listed product image on that website.
How can ShopClues.com send such a rubbish to me in place of the actual product. Don't know? Because they want you to stop buying from them. They want to win the competition of "Who will lead the way of putting Online Shopping to an end?"One of my friend suggested me to send an email to ShopClues for this. I was like, now I will have to send a mail to them. Chat with them for hours to get my money back. I was sure, this will not result into anything fruitful and yes I was correct. This is what they sent as a reply:
Such a pathetic serve!
All in all, I wasted hell lot of time for this crap. This leads to too much frustration. Now, at least ShopClues.com has made sure that their will not get any load from one customer.
This is not only limited to one website. Many customers around the country are facing the similar issues. Most of them receive defected products. Most of them receive broken products. More unfortunate people like me receive completely different product. There are even more unfortunate people who do not receive anything on placing an online order.
What will this lead to?
If instances like this continue to happen, then end of online shopping is not too far.
According to a presentation in "Global Ecommerce Summit", Online shopping is expected to end in 2020. But I think, at least in India, it will happen much before that because the number of fraud cases like these are increasing day by day.
How giants are performing?
Someone may argue that fraud cases like these are limited to small companies only and one will never face such problems with Big Giants. But this is also not true at all. Since I too have started doing too much online shopping, so I have faced too many issues with giants also.
Around a year back, I bought a product with eBay and had a very bad experience with it also. I reported it to their customer support(For that, I had to talk to them for many hours continuously). But everything was wasted. My money was never returned and I had to keep the faulty product.
I openly wrote it down on Quora(Click here to see that post) requesting someone from eBay to look into this but till today, no one contacted me. Looks like, they are least bothered about customer satisfaction.