There doesn’t seem to be a nook and cranny now where you can turn to and not hear something about online shopping. Right from schoolboys on the bus furiously discussing if they should get PlayStations on the Internet to grandfathers looking at newspaper ads for e-tailing sites and wondering if they could get their medicines online, the whole country is drifting on an e-commerce bubble characterised by usage of plastic to make payments, impulsive buying and the hunt for that perfect price – an offer you cannot refuse.
It then comes as no surprise that an industry study on the surge of online retail says malls country-wide can expect a 50-55 per cent drop in footfalls this festive season. The report also pegs at a whopping Rs 10,000 crore the amount of e-sales expected over the next few months.
With Express reaching out to dozens of buyers to catch up on their e-shopping experiences, one thing seems to be clear — first check out what your stars have in store for you before you log in to the e-store. One extremely unlucky techie, M Subramanian, ordered a Dell laptop from letsbuy.com (before it was taken over by Flipkart), only to receive one without a hard drive. When he contacted customer care, they redirected him to Dell, who in turn told him the laptop was from the grey market and had been smuggled in from Pakistan. If you’re at the other end of the luck spectrum, like another techie Madhu B was, you could order a Nikon DSLR camera worth Rs 32,000 from Flipkart, end up receiving a camera worth Rs 49,000 and be allowed to keep it too, after he rang up the customer care and told them about the mix up.
According to Internet and Mobile Association of India research in 2013, 34 per cent of the products bought online were electronics, while the share of clothing and apparel stood at 30 per cent. Conforming to this, most interviewees said they had purchased electronics and clothing, though there were even those who ordered teddy bears and even condoms and marijuana-crushers. This medium seemed to offer a definitive advantage – any taboo-inducing products can be bought online with no hassle. Lacy underwear would arrive in the same covered box as say, a T-shirt. The rates of return were also highest for clothing. From sarees not matching the pictures that were shown online in colour or quality, to ill-fitting jeans and not-so-good-looking dresses, interviewees complained that online shopping for clothes wasn’t really the best idea.
However, most of them did not seem to have trouble replacing defective electronic items or wrong-size clothes – the nearly unanimous response was that the customer service representatives were ‘polite’ while dealing with them. However, in the case of L R Jayaraman – who ordered a Samsung TV on Snapdeal – this polite nature didn’t necessarily mean he got what he ordered. After placing an order worth nearly Rs 60,000 for a 40-inch television, the only promptness he received was the automated confirmation message that it would be shipped in 48 hours. This soon became a parroted time frame that spanned several sets of 48 hours – he had to hound several customer care executives over the next few days, who promised shipment in 48 hours, but to no avail. His order was simply cancelled 12 days later, and his amount was refunded as the “buyer was not willing to sell for that price”. On the flip side, Shameena Saleem, who works at an event management company, is all praise for Snapdeal’s lower prices for contact lenses and how she ended up saving about Rs 350 a month by ordering through the site.
Just as Shameena swears by Snapdeal for lenses, Ayesha Minhaz, a bookworm, says Amazon doles out the best deals on books, while several users say they were able to get electronic spares such as laptop chargers on E-bay.
With the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) pointing out that most of the Internet users in the country access it through mobile phones (92 per cent), the e-tail market is not far behind in catching up with customers on mobile apps. Flipkart’s Android application has been installed a colossal 1-5 crore times, among the highest, with Snapdeal at 50 lakh-1 crore installs and Myntra at 10-50 lakh installs, according to Play Store.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) report points out that the number of Internet users has jumped by about 11 million in the last quarter alone, thereby underscoring the enormous potential of these stores to reach out. E-shopping has penetrated even Tier-II cities and towns, where it is certainly tougher to get things like electronic spares for laptops. Says Harini Mohan, an MBBS student from Gobichettipalayam, “I have ordered laptop battery, pen drive, earphones and books through e-shopping.” This journalist just ordered half a kg of Tirunelveli halwa online. Is there anything at all that hasn’t reached the online marketplace yet?