May 14, 2011 05:25 AM
2281 Views
I really don't know what to make of this outfit. In as competitive a time as today's, when Flipkart, Infibeam, Landmark SimplyBooks and possibly others are running neck to neck and trying to beat the others in shipping price/delivery and sourcing time, it is inconceivable how such an online outfit could survive all this time.
I am kicking myself for having ordered from I/P despite knowing about my previous colleagues' bad experience ordering children's goods from them. Still, I thought that for items like currently released books, they should be all right, and worth hazarding a risk.
Expectedly the thing has devolved into a farcical comedy. Order Number IN0405110537 was placed on the 4th of May with the date of shipment auto-generated as 7th. Of course based on all the feedback I had no expectation of their actually meeting that date, but when they updated the status as being ready to ship, I too fell for it like countless other first timers at the site.
Subsequent to that I have been having fun trying to plumb to what depths they can fall in unprofessionalism. I view an online purchase at I/P as akin to a high risk gamble. If you are lucky, you get the goods at a very low price(unmatchable from other vendors), but if unlucky(much more likely), you lose your entire investment. I called on Monday to be told that the books would be shipped that very day, later in the evening. When this did not take place, on Tuesday I called again and was told that the books would be shipped two days later. On Thursday, they said that there was a delay in procuring the books and so they would be shipped 8 days later, the following Friday. When my eyes hit the ceiling(and I pressed the representative further as to why this was the case), she said that one book would ship one day earlier. I decided to call after one hour as I had lost all belief in these people, and sure enough another person came online and said that the books would be shipped definitely by the weekend. I am certain that when I call on Monday there will be yet another answer and my woes will not end.
Have you ever waited for a Windws update on how long a piece of software will take to install? Thier estimates fluctuate non-linearly and wildly - 10 hours - 2 mins - 3 days - 4 hours - 7 mins . and so on and you have absolutely no idea which one of them is the reliable estimate.
Such is the case with Indiaplaza. The phone reps make matters worse than they already are by their careless, thoughtless and utterly random number generated estimates of delivery without regard for people ordering. It is hard to think of an outfit worse managed and for which one really cannot find a single good word. It is high time they realized that they would have sustained if they had charged low prices while maintaining every other aspect at a high standard. In that case, for instance, they could justify taking longer to deliver, and people would have subscribed if they weren't in a hurry. As long as they had a delivery time, ANY DELIVERY TIME commitment that they could honour.
This is undoubtedly my first and last time with this mockery of e-shopping. It will make for good party-table conversation in the future("tell me your worst online shopping expereince" . "no, I have one that's even worse" .) but it's left a bitter taste for all the aggravation. I am going back to flipkart now.
PS: Isn't it absurd how mouthshut seems to have become willy-nilly the defacto customer complaint portal for I/P? Because I/P don't addrss the tickets raised on their own site?
