SHOPPING MADE EASY BY SNAPDEAL. Review on Snapdeal

Online shopping is not a new idea in India. Times Shopping and Shopping have been offering this for a few years now. But it has become a practical idea now. Most of the shopping sites are funded today. They have the money, the set up and the understanding of the business. They are serious about their branding, quite a few spend crores on advertising and evoke the trust needed to shop on the basis of a few photographs.

Best of all, the sites are better. Almost all of them have thousands of products, pretty good photographs and easy to navigate modern websites. Check out one of the older ecommerce sites and this new one or this one and you can see why a stiff like me will so easily buy products that he can’t touch.

Anyway, there is no need for me to educate you about the joys of online shopping. Now, let’s get down in the trenches and get the hard work of comparing the sites done.

ITS A GOOD SITE FOR ONLINE SHOPPING..

Snapdeal.

Snapdeal.com AND APP ALSO ON AVAILABLE ON PLAY STORE AND APP STORE.

Snapdeal started as a Groupon clone, a regular daily deal website. Gradually, it has evolved into a complete e-commerce store. I had bought a few deals before, so didn’t think too much about ordering a few products.

Payment:

I paid by credit card. I know it will come naturally to many to choose cash on delivery. But I was spending a nominal amount and wanted my reward points.

Order confirmation:

Once you place the order, you can jump to the my orders page and see the status for each of the products. The tracking works down to the last detail, tells you the status at every checkpoint.

Packaging:

Of all the sites I ordered from, Snapdeal had the most excessive packaging. Safe and secure, yes, but very excessive. Ten of the products I ordered the first time were sent in 3 different packages, all wrapped within a print out of the bill, bubble wrap and branding outer paper. If they can sort out the packaging and streamline the logistics, they will cut out a lot of wastage. If you think I am being a pain about the packaging, I am not the only one. Farhad Manjoo has a great post on how product packaging has improved.

Overall experience:

My experience was really good for the ten products, but I had also ordered twelve. There was no update on the last two for more than a week. So, I wrote to them inquiring the status. I got a reply saying they were too sorry but they were too overwhelmed with the response! Is that another way of saying they were understaffed?

Two days later, I wrote back asking if there was an update. I got exactly the same mail. I waited a day and wrote back requesting them to deliver the products. Just to emphasize how serious I was, I also put in a small post script that if they were unable to deliver, I will like to be refunded. I got a single line reply that a refund has been forwarded. I kept mailing that I still wanted the product if they had it, but no luck, they had put me on an auto responder.

Any special mentions:

Nope, there were no surprises.

Update on 3rd April, 2013:

Ordered a perfume on 25th March. Snapdeal took 2 days to work out a delivery date. It was shipped 6 days later. Still waiting 8 days later. None of my orders from Snapdeal has reached on time. Conclusion: When in a hurry, give this one a miss.

I SHARE MY FRIEND WORST EXPERIENCE

A seller of products on Snapdeal. My selling experience and dealing with the staff at Snapdeal has been the worst experience of my life. I'd rather get kicked in the nuts and take that pain than deal with the incompetent, useless and absolutely hideous staff at Snapdeal.

From the time I started selling on Snapdeal, those guys owe me more than Rs. 4000 in payments. They have still not paid this to me. Also, they have made more profit on my products than I actually did. Let me explain.

I sell posters on Snapdeal for Rs. 189.(159 for the product and 30 bucks for shipping). The total= Rs. 189. What this means is that Snapdeal charges their commission, payment collection fees and courier fees and then pays me the rest of the money.

However, what happened at Snapdeal is this.

They charged me everything on the product price 159(Courier Fees, Payment Collection Fees, Marketing Fees and Commission). After all their cuts, I got Rs. 60. They took Rs. 99.

Now, the remaining Rs. 30 that I charged the customer for shipping is missing. Apparently, the shipping charges are not given to me. What on earth happened to them then? Gone. Poof. Snapdeal just takes it. According to their so called policy, they don't pay the seller the money the seller collected to ship the product.

So, Snapdeal basically made Rs. 129 while I got Rs. 60 for making and selling the product. Absolutely ridiculous.

I am still trying to talk to the goddamn seller support that they have to sort this out.