Are Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Ebay, ... cheating the public?

Are e-commerce sites like Flipkart, Amazon (India), Snapdeal, Ebay, etc cheating the Indian population/public when it comes to many electronic devices resale?

Most electronic, electrical manufacturers/vendors (like networking products, mobiles, televisions, washing machines, etc) refuse warranty when it comes to these e-commerce sites. However, these sites continue to sell (or allow others to sell) these goods claiming manufacturer/other warranty.

Isn't that willful cheating or misleading?

The irony or the salt on the wound is that these very manufacturers/vendors often sell their goods via online retailers/e-commerce sites in other parts of the world!! That's adding insult to injury, IMHO. I understand that it's market forces at play, and it's often a tough choice, and there's probably no right/wrong answer. If these new e-commerce sites only represent 5% of the retail market, shouldn't these guys be embracing them happily? Afterall, 95% is still out there via traditional model. Or are they scared it will change and lead to power shift, and/or worried about antagonizing the remaining 95% of the market?

Eg., d-link denounces e-commerce sites such as flipkart, amazon, snapdeal!
Flipkart claims 3 years d-link manufacturer warranty.
Amazon claims 3 years warranty. Not sure who gives it - manufacturer / amazon / retailer? (Item in question sold by RageDeal and fulfilled by Amazon)
Snapdeal claims lifetime warranty! (sold by Trico online VOI)

I don't think these sites can ethically claim ignorance if the item is sold by a 3rd party retailer using their website. Although, they can possibly legally do so.

What's your thought? And, who should intervene to protect the consumer?

Large Scale Cheating on RAJ TV?

Flipping TV channels and happened to see "Cinema Theriyuma" on Raj TV (13-Feb-2011, around 10.40pm). A show to "Guess the Celebrities". One needs to call 5664426 - Rs.10/- per minute. It's very clear that the show is rigged to the core. "Supposed" callers give the wrong answer every time. I'm quite suspicious that the channel is placing fake calls to build up the momentum. See the photo below - it's clear it's Sarat Kumar and Rajinikanth - the calls have been coming in wrong for half an hour now - unbelievable.

Interestingly my mom just walked by and said she blew about Rs.100 a few days ago on this call - was made to wait on the call by someone who prompted her to stay on for 10 minutes - counter ticking. It's sad - I'm quite sure there are tons of such gullible people who get duped. A search on the net shows good number of complaints about this program. I'd say shame on the channel and the relevant regulators for allowing this to go on. Clearly a sign of unholy nexus between tv channel, telephone companies and dare I say regulators as well?

India Film Industry on Twitter

Is it a way to stay connected with their audience, fan club or is it a strategy to attract eyeballs or both or more?!

http://twitter.com/#!/list/sudhirlp/cinema

Doesn't necessarily contain everyone in the industry, just some I've come across. A wikipedia entry may be worth this one?

Mobile Lost

The wifey lost her phone on Friday evening, 31-Dec-2010. It was lost at Adyar between the visit to Birla Planetarium, Peryiar Science and Technology Center and visit to JP (Car) Battery center (more on all those in possibly another post).

It was a phone that was passed down to her from her sister via her mom. While the phone was a very old model (0.3MP camera), it was certainly fully functional and carrier lot of sentimental attachment. Resale value of it wouldn't be anything more than Rs.100 to Rs.300.

However, it brought back my attention to the fact that Indian telecom market is in between being ill-equipped and disinterested to handle mobile phone loss. While the service provider will block the sim and issue a duplicate one, they are not at all keen in tracing the mobile phone with the help of IMEI (this does require co-ordination between service providers so that the device can be tracked between networks).

The good thing however is that I remember reading an article in the newspapers recently (within last 2 weeks to a month) that mobile phone tracking (in case of loss, security?) is going to become a reality soon in the Indian market thanks to government pressure, service providers "supposedly" upgrading to required technology and collaborating between themselves. I'm not holding my breath on that one, but it would certainly be interesting and useful if it came to fruition.

We ended up getting an LG GS190 thanks to its support of an 8GB microSD card and an ok speaker phone - key requirements for the wife and kid to listen to music.

Interestingly, Univercell, the mobile phone retailer offered a mobile insurance plan for a year (to protect against loss, accidental damage, etc) for as little as Rs.50 (or Rs.100?), but I refused. I'm guessing getting that refund will be a problem in case of loss - thanks to the requirement of going to a police station to register the loss and possibly getting an acknowledgement! And you know easy (or relishing experience) that can be!

HP India Warranty - being "accommodating"

Further to the earlier problem about my laptop left speaker not working, the rectification required that the entire laptop bottom casing (with touchpad) be replaced. A 21-day valid quote for Rs.3,604/- was provided.

After a little bit of back and back and forth between HP, their local repair assistance Mahaelectronics and me, they "agree" to "consider" my request as a special case and have now indeed replaced the necessary part without any charge under warranty.

I'm now thankful to all those concerned that they did indeed have the wisdom (at least in hindsight) to take care of the request of a genuine long standing customer.

I do however sincerely believe that they do need to improve their support procedure with the following (quoting from my previous post).

1. The line of questioning of onsite support is misleading and bordering on cross questioning with an intent to find fault. It is just not downright ethical.
2. If there are known software which will void HP's warranty, they must provide audit software which will help customers chose, install and use right software on their computers.
3. Such information must also be provided during warranty purchase / activation. Afterall, I paid close to Rs.4000-5000 for annual warranty and that is by no means cheap money in India (or anywhere else).

Twice indeed has the warranty program saved my "skin". An earlier display problem which required replacing the entire display of my nx7400 at possibly Rs.15k-22k and now this. It's also neat that my warranty is an "onsite warranty" which means that they come down to my residence to take care of these issues and it saves me time and effort of taking it down to their service center.

So, if you do own an HP laptop, you may want to consider obtaining the warranty, notwithstanding such instances.

HP India Warranty - Fraud or oversight or callousness - nx7400

The sound from my HP nx7400 laptop left speaker is distorted for quite some time now.

1. I have an onsite warranty and when I called up the support center today, they asked me if the problem was apparent across media (mp3) players.
2. When they asked what media players, I said itunes, winamp.
3. There was an "innocous question" whether it was also on VLC.
4. I said it was on all players, itunes, winamp, vlc, etc.
Immediately, the question was repeated, "does it also happen on VLC media player?"
5. When I said "Yes", the support person immediately jumped on this and said "If you use VLC, warranty is not available".

This is supposedly so since VLC can be run at 400% volume levels which can cause problems. While it doesn't mean that I have run at these (or lower) levels, mere presence of this software has voided warranty now.

While I somewhat agree with such company policies, I have few major issues with this.

1. The line of questioning of onsite support is misleading and bordering on cross questioning with an intent to find fault. It is just not downright ethical.
2. If there are known software which will void HP's warranty, they must provide audit software which will help customers chose, install and use right software on their computers.
3. Such information must also be provided during warranty purchase / activation. Afterall, I paid close to Rs.4000-5000 for annual warranty and that is by no means cheap money in India (or anywhere else).

I provided feedback to the customer support on point (2) above and was asked to get in touch with in.ced@hp.com to provide feedback about such improvements. I certainly will.

So, beware - of such - policies and software.

I feel quite cheated.

Rediscovering Freedom - on the road

It's been close to 8 years since I gave up using a 2 wheeler actively (in fact I sold my bike in about a year or 2 since I got my first car in 2003 since I was sparingly using the bike). While I've always liked the comfort of driving an air-conditioned 4-wheeler, listening to my favorite music, the traffic hold-ups, no-parking-space issues always irritated me, not to mention the time that it would take to get from point A to B within any city in India.

Of late, I've started dropping the little one at school on a 2 wheeler (used to be the car earlier, moved to 2 wheeler to save time). Began with my dad's scooter with the little one sandwiched between dad (me) & mom. And then, I "upgraded" to using my friend's bike. Slowly have started using it for my regular travel as well - ended up buying a helmet for myself, backpack for travel to office, fork-lock for the vehicle (Yamaha RX 135 has a notorious side lock that's always prone to frequent breakage).

It's bliss now! Not sure how long this'll continue. Rains can be a spoil-sport. If you've been on Indian roads, you will know what I mean - both in terms of bliss and pain! :)

Tata Docomo doesn't like money

As silly & stupid as it sounds, I'm quite inclined to believe that Tata & Docomo don't like to make money. I've been running around a few shops for a few days just to try and figure out how I can get some prepaid phones in the family converted to their new 45p/min plan. None of them in the shops know how to do it - maybe marketing is going overdrive without implementation on the ground.

Also, their damned website has no simple way for me to give them money! I can't just go online, pick a recharge/top-up amount, input a phone number and pay money via credit card/net banking transfer.

Am guessing the top honchos obviously don't eat their own dog food. Nor do their near & dear ones.

You can see I'm pretty pissed off. And, I'm not even getting into those other complaints about bad signal quality, calls not getting transferred across networks, etc!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Vodafone penalizes customer $$ for solicited feedback

Catchy headline ? Not catchy enough ? Anyway. Here's the deal.

If you have registered a complaint or have had an interaction with a vodafone customer care personnel (in India), there's a chance you will get an sms requesting for feedback whether you are satisfied with the interaction or the case handling/closure. It also states very clearly that the reply is to their TOLL FREE NUMBER.

However, if you are naive enough to reply to that number while in roaming within any part of the country - WHAM!! You'll get hit with a significant roaming sms charge - although it was they who wanted to know your feedback in order to "improve quality of service" !!

So, BEWARE.

Talking to their customer care about their misleading messaging is pointless. They promised to take the feedback to the "concerned department" - now we all know what that means !!

Government Web site infrastructure still not upto mark

It doesn't bode very well when the website for the government isn't up and running 24x7. Right now (around 8am, 2-Oct-2008, Thursday), the Tamil Nadu government website is down. Infact, even the name resolution (nslookup) doesn't pass !

Irrespective of whether it's a hack or just infrastructure down, something is certainly amiss.

Printing Digital Photos in India ...

Finally, thanks to "The Hindu" newspaper, I came to know about the existence of printing digital photos via websites in India.

Almost all of these sites provide unlimited storage for photo albums and will print and courier photos to your home. I'm yet to see a tie-up emerging between these photo sites and a major retailer like Food World, Spencers, Trinethra, Subiksha, Reliance Retail, Konica or Kodak Digital Express Studios, etc. That option would allow me to ask my prints to be printed at the nearest retailer and provide a pick-up option, thereby saving on costly courier charges.

Here's the list of sites.

Snapfish India (a wholly owned subsidiary of India)
MeraSnap
ZoomIn
Picsquare

Have tried out Snapfish, fairly satisfied with the photos. The site definitely has a lot of scope for improvement. Their courier charges seem a bit on the higher side when compared to others. However, the HP name is what gives me certain amount of peace of mind in terms of a lot of things.

May try out others.

Reality check about India ?

While I really can't vouch for the sanctity of some of the statistics quoted in the article noted below, it does present a good overall picture about direction things are/could be headed in, for India.

And, I know that it paints both a picture of despair and opportunity - rightly so. It remains to be seen which of these two gains the upper hand in the long run. I sincerely hope that we are able to capitalize on the opportunity at hand, although it seems to be a really tough thing to do given all the reality on ground.

"Good, Must Read" for those interested in India, from BusinessWeek.

The Trouble With India