Worst ever shopping experience. Review on Groupon

If you thought that online shopping and awesome deals had arrived in India and Groupon was the way forward, you'd be terribly disappointed. It's extremely messy, utterly disorganized and the customer service is awful and unresponsive.

In August this year, I'd placed an order for an Orange color Summer Nehru Jacket for INR 499 as the deal sounded decent. When the product arrived, it wasn't the size that I'd ordered for. It was Large instead of Medium. Since Groupon doesn't offer replacements, I had to return the product and ask for a refund.

The process of returns/ refunds is also extremely excruciating. One has to lodge a return request online, take some ticket number and write it on a prescribed form and place it within the return parcel. They then ask you to use the ticket number and a Groupon code to lodge a pickup with blue dart so that they come and pick up the return parcel. Thereafter, one has to inform the airway bill number to Groupon customer care online.

And despite the lengthy process they used for returns, I never had my refund credited to me for more than two months. I had to follow up incessantly. The customer care is simply awful and they keep parroting the same lines again and again without offering a suitable response. Finally, the refund was credited to me in the third week of October, after two long months since I'd placed the original order and returned it.

Latest update: Since I had the credit still pending in my account, I tried placing a new order to use up the credit. The new order was for 699 and I had to pay INR 200 extra. But the site had a technical issue and didn't show the OTP screen. Apropos, my INR 499 credit became ZERO without even placing an order. Amazing! When I call customer service, they curtly tell me that it is common and the credit will come back to me after 48 hours.

Going by all these negative experiences, I would seriously suggest people to be extremely careful while shopping on this website. The customer service is simply awful. If you are willing to bear with all the nonsense they throw at you, please go ahead. Else, if you want a hassle free shopping experience, look elsewhere.