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Another thing is cost of real estate. The online shop doesn't need to spend money on having big showroom in prime area which is expensive. I think the biggest saving comes from there.
Croma has been giving pretty good prices on mobile recently. I got a Lumia 525 from Croma which was 100 Rs cheaper than both flipkart and amazon at that time (more than a month and a half back). You need to bargain hard though.
No, a lot of them have shut down - for eg. the Circuit City chain, the Borders chain, the CompUSA chain all have shut down. Many others have close some of their stores. But c'est le vie. Around a decade or two before that, these same chains were responsible for local electronic shops, local book shops closing down (see Tom Hank's You Got Mail).

What's wrong with that? Even the same seller will sell 2 different customers at diff prices depending on how hard you bargain.

Also don't online sellers also have different prices - i.e. Flipkar sells a product for x while Amazon sells for y.

You are missing the point- Flipkart doesn't sell the same product at different prices based on the buyer. The buyer is free to go else where and buy.
But with brick and mortar shops which doesn't have a open pricing system the dealer is free to sell the same product at different prices.

They do it in other ways. They have coupons, Cash Back on some credit cards, etc. If you take the effort to search for coupons, or find the right CC etc, you will get the discount. At a Brick and Mortar store, if you bargain, you will get the discount.

That's the same in B & M stores, right?


Flipkart is also free to sell the same product at diff prices - they have diff prices every other day on a lot of stuff.

I think what he means to say is that in a B&M store, they'll possibly tell you the price based on how you look, whereas on the internet its a simple business offer made at that perticular point of time to ALL customers.

I have placed about 10 orders in Amazon in the last week and 3 in FK - All where I could only buy the stuff at FK. Neither of them had faster delivery options and boy, have I had to wait for everything :0
One thing to note though - every package that was delivered through Amazon was still delivered ahead of time, while most packages which were supposed to delivered by courier companies - Blu Dart, Gati, Aramex - have all been late. I have about 5 orders where the delivery date was yesterday and I am yet to see them. For the first time probably I can fault Amazon for something.
FK on the other had is fast to process the order but they seem to love sitting on it.

Here is the status of a phone ordered. Note - FK is still well within the delivery times promised. But something that 'was' supposed to be in Bangalore yesterday has not even been updated.

Not really flipkart advertises the price and the buyer is free to choose and research if he has the required CC or coupons to get additional discounts.
In a B&M shop price is changed randomly based on who what etc -etc Which I believe isn't fair and open.

Exactly Nazi! In a B&M store the price is determined by the person you interact with, and based on what you drive who you are etc-etc.
A person wearing a lot of gold and driving a fairly large SUV and speaks the local language, Son of XYZ might get a lower price for the same product compared to a techie from a different part of the country. Even tho the techie might have A to Z knowledge about the product hes buying!

This happens very much in SP road with computers, with tyres, Spare in JC road etc etc..




Diwali Holiday ? :D

Snapdeal says they will replace / refund . Now i have a question since only if i increase volume the amp trips it is like on and off cycle .So i to be truthfull really do not know is the amp really faulty as my old trusty 3501 GTO doesnot trip on the same setup.I guess i will just give it back for peace of mind.

For my orders, they are playing it safe with delivery lead times of 10 days+ so that they are not at fault. The committed delivery date changes after you have confirmed & paid for the order (compared to what is displayed on the screen when ordering). I cancelled a couple of gifts from Flipkart since I didn't want to spend more on priority delivery. Hanging on to amazon orders because I got some sweet deals.

A Vegetable Cutter I had ordered for mom from Amazon was supposed to have been delivered on the 13th of October. But 10 days on, and no sight of it yet.

The product hasn't even left Delhi since the 10th of this month and no updates since. I have chatted with their Customer Care 4-5 times, every time, it's the same response. Please wait for 2-5 days because they are experiencing in-transit delays. I cannot cancel the order because I need to choose a pickup date for a product I am yet to receive if I am to cancel the order.

Got a call from Amazon Customer Service last night. He told me that they have received an unprecedented number of orders, hence the delay. I told him that I can understand a 2-3 day delay. But 10 days is not acceptable. He asked me to wait for another 2-5 days. In the meantime, I have re-ordered the product. I will keep the one that comes first and reject delivery of the one to come next.

A friend of mine had ordered a book. Expected delivery was last Wednesday. Still no show.

Very disappointed with Amazon!

Amazon has taken delivery times to an absolute new level, much slower than India post if I may say. My order has arrived in Bangalore yesterday at 9am and so far no update on why it is not out for delivery. It took almost 7 days for it to arrive here from MH. I have already paid for the order and I need the product, hence holding onto a thin line of patience for them to deliver it. Probably the last time I will order from them, never had this experience earlier.
If they could not have managed these many orders, they should have stopped taking the orders in the first place.

On any online store once the money is paid the care for delivery decreases.
Having it be on cash on delivery makes them want to get the item delivered.
Amazon being in US has much better delivery ratings compared to all else, but it is also going into an Indian mentality.

Example: You don't pay a carpenter full money before he has made your order. You pay a quarter the amount first and the remaining after job completes. If you pay them all or half they become lazy.

Standing along with you in this matter with Amazon.
:deadhorse

The delivery of my brother's new phone from Bangalore to Bhubaneswar took a staggering 9 days !! Courier Company - Fed Ex.

The consignment went from: Bangalore > Mumbai > New Delhi > Kolkata > Bhubaneswar.
Was it that cheaper to re-route a consignment through so many hubs ? :eek:
I just ran out of self-explanation !!

Just to put things in perspective here.

We really ought not to compare courier deliveries in the developed world vis a vis India.

The simple truth is that logistics, transportation and communications thereof are completely unpredictable here.

This is the major challenge when it comes to making a committed delivery.

Lol man.





Shankar,

While is completely agree with your post on principle, I find it tough to reconcile with the routing in Souymajit's post.

There's inefficiency and there's incredibly retarded routing. These guys aren't mom and pop shops serving their first online order but fairly large companies with some reasonable systems. They may not be optimized fully but I don't think it is fair to consider this an reflection of the industry when it is frankly an outlier.

Here's my thesis. Probably it was traveling by air freight (train would've been faster!) bhubaneswar has limited air connectivity, only one direct flight of Indigo from blr. If FedEx doesn't use them, then they'd route it through Mumbai or delhi. It seems it kept missing the connection to bhubaneswar so they kept sending out forward to the next airport with a connection to bhubaneswar. Classic case of people not focused on doing the right thing / customer delight but just showing that they have cleared all their parcels, regardless of the costs to the system.

I would reckon it more as bad kpi driven behavior than unreliability or unpredictability of the system. Same outcome, different premise.

My Diwali shopping from Amazon turns out to be a bitter one. Ordered a camera on 11th and it took them a week to ship. The 'overnight parcel' by Aramex took 7 nights to reach Bangalore, and it is yet to be delivered - it is stuck in Hebbal for a day!

Amazon did a pathetic job of planning the big sale and their warehouse and courier partners operations have ground to a halt. Too bad that the courier companies could not anticipate and handle the additional rush.

Flipkart did a far better job and they themselves having the courier greatly helped. I live near their HSR hub and I could see their delivery vehicles multiply over the period of two weeks.