The Amazon of India?

Ever since I started e-shopping, like most out there, Amazon.com was my default choice. They are way ahead of the competition in brining innovative ways of shopping experience for the customers. Having used Amazon.com while in US, I was thinking that they have a similar global reach. In US, they ship most of the articles without any shipping and handling fee. I was in doubt about their plans for international shipping strategy before I set out to order right from India. I was ready to pay up for a minimal S&H fee for the International Shipping and of course, I was ready to wait and let Amazon take their sweat time dispatching the product. Unfortunately, I realized that the S&H cost was much higher than the article itself that I was planning to order.

That is when I googled for the same product with "India" suffix and the first hit was http://www.fabmall.com/. I had an experience with fabmall in the past trying to order a house hold appliance from US destined for delivery in India. That was, by far, one of the worst online shopping experience I ever had. Even after collecting the payment, they took about 2 months before they delivered the product. And, for the worst part, they shipped an alternate model than the one I ordered citing reason that thye ran out of stock of the previous item. Okay, enough to have them black-listed in my list of shopping sites.


However, I recently checked out their service again. I had to order for a book urgently and they seemed to be the only store carrying it. And the experience was not bad. They shipped the item on time. Unfortunately, this time their courier service failed to deliver the product on time. I logged a compliant with fabmall, and at the same time tried to get in touch with the local courier agency. The courier folks finally made it to deliver, of course after a delay. By then, fabmall shipped a replacement for the item lost in transit. I was embarrassed and acknowledged them that I already received the order. Then comes the final twist! They shipped the replacement order after a month and asked me to accept the replacement and ship back the original. The ultimate climax! Of course, they charge you for S&H (I paid Rs.25 for a book that costs Rs. 500/-)


Following are certain other sites out there are that you may want to check out!
http://www.ndtvshopping.com/
http://www.futurebazaar.com/
http://shopping.indiatimes.com/

For Books, you may want to check out the following.
http://books.rediff.com/
http://www.firstandsecond.com/
http://www.booksatbahri.com/
http://gobookshopping.com/
http://www.kithabay.com
http://www.bookshopofindia.com/


Rediff books ste is pretty responsive and they offers most of the latest books on print. Some of these sites claim that they have free S&H service. So, whom do you think is poised to become the Amazon.com of India?

1 comments:

Amazing Books said...

Bookshop of India (www.bookshopofindia.com) is certainly the winner. They have a huge collection of latest Indian Books. The service is also good.