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About a year back, we had a really bad experience with Flipkart's return policy, which made my family stop ordering from them. This is a slightly convoluted case, so do read slowly.

This happened when a cousin was getting married in Udupi. Mr. Cousin lives in Bangalore, but hometown is Udupi. Mr. Cousin orders a tablet as a gift for an aunt who has come to Udupi from Miraj. For convenience sake, item is shipped to my house in Bangalore, I carry it to Udupi and give it to Mrs. Aunty during the wedding.

As it turns out, tablet is defective, and not recording or playing any audio. Mr. Cousin is now on honeymoon and Mrs. Aunty is still in Udupi. Now starts the drama.

Mr. Cousin calls Flipkart asking for the product to be returned. They say "log it in website", and after a couple of days he does. Asks for the product to be picked up from Udupi, and they first refuse saying return pick up must be from same address as delivery. After a bit of haggling, they put him through some sort of address change process, and promise to pick up the tablet from Udupi.
Flipkart man turns up at my doorstep for the tablet!
Call them again. Another appointment to pick up the tablet from Udupi. Again, Flipkart man comes to my house.
This happens another couple of times, and Mrs. Aunty comes to our house in Bangalore with the defective tablet.

Mr. Cousin, now back from his honeymoon, calls Flipkart again, and this time, says that tablet is to be picked up from the original delivery address as per their policy. OK, they say. Flipkart man goes to Udupi house! :Frustrati

By now, Mr. Cousin is losing it, and has pulled all his contacts to start escalating the issue. After some emails go to Mr.Bansal, Flipkart agrees to take the product back. Ask him to log another return on their website, then refuse because 30 days have passed. My wife steps in now, and starts negotiating.

Finally, after a couple of days of heated discussions between my wife and a couple of managers in Flipkart, they agree that they made mistakes and pick up the tablet from my house in Bangalore. Mr. Cousin gets a refund.

No, this is not the end of the story!

Next day, my wife gets a call from the local Flipkart delivery office's manager. This man was in an apoplectic rage. Apparently, him and his flunky (who made 3 fruitless trips to my house before actually picking up the tablet) were being blamed for the whole mess, and he demanded that my wife be present in a conference call with his superiors and clear his name! At first my wife refused, but then, when the local delivery flunky pleaded his case, she got on that call and explained the whole saga. She says the call was an incoherent shouting match between 2 managers of different departments.

I also have my fair share or rants on FlipKart. I work in Manyata embassy business park in hebbal, bangalore and anyone working here will know their home delivery is a joke. Every time I ordered a product from flipkart, the delivery person would call me and ask me to come to CTZ to collect it. I mean why would I do it. If I had to, I will buy it from a store. This happened to me even after complaining to them multiple times.

On top of it, the attitude of delivery representatives towards customer is; either you come pick it up or f*** off :mad:

I have stopped using flipkart and use amazon for most of my online shopping. The service from amazon so far has been amazing. I hope it remains like that.

KiloAlpha,
Thanks for sharing this. It seems that I was living in a bubble where Flipkart was the best e-commerce website. I am glad that this bubble has now burst!

Anybody can throw a curveball as far as returns go. In my experience of shopping, the only time it has been declined is with Amazon, for a not amazon fulfilled order. I mentioned "ordered mistakenly", and the seller responded with "thats your problem, not mine."

The best experience has been with, surprise surprise, Shopclues. No questions, collected from home. They sell cheap, so you may end up with very bad quality, though only occasionally. Put it up for refund, and its gone at the most in 2 days.


One time, though, both amazon and snapdeal came together to screw my happiness. I put in a return on snapdeal, and my wife put in a return on amazon. The amazon guy collected the snapdeal package, and that is now 2K I have lost at kumbh....:D

I always order from amazon, and buy only 'Amazon fulfilled' products. Snapdeal & even paytm has a worry free return policy, but Amazon's returns are just too smooth.

Flipkart doesn't (or didn't) have returns, it is only for product mismatches. So I have more or less stopped ordering from them. Amazon lets me select the pickup address which can be different from delivery address, and the money is returned very fast.

I was once a flip-kart user. I didn't have any bad experience with them, but the amazon service was simply a class above flip-kart.

How is that possible? How did you initiate the return on a wrong website! Or were you guys trying to return two products and one of them got swapped?

Had a pleasant experience with Amazon once, had ordered a rechargeable table fan. As per the spec. it was supposed to work for 3 to 4 hours on a single charge but the battery used to get discharged after 15 to 20 minutes.

Asked Amazon for a return. Got an e-mail that we won't take back the product (could be because it has rechargeable battery), they asked me to dispose the fan and promptly credited 2.5k in my account within a day. No I use it once in a while as a regular AC table fan :-)

Few days back, I was browsing Amazon and saw the Mi Fitness band which they are selling at 12XX INR, while the MRP of the same in Mi website is 799 INR. I tweeted the same to Amazon, asking them to look into this since it is a crime to sell an item above MRP. I got a standard canned response saying they will look into this, and have forwarded my complaint to the concerned department.

Now, to see what happens, I was keeping an eye on the page and was reminding amazon about the pending resolution - and today I got a reply in twitter that the enquiry they do is internal and they will not be able to share with me the outcome of my complaint. What a load of BS. If they cannot share the outcome of my complaint, what is the point in taking the complaint?

And almost 11 days and multiple reminders later, the sellers are still merrily selling the item above MRP.

--Anoop

A snapshot of Flipkart's Return policy related to When returns are not possible. Clearly, it misses some conditions.

That is the daylight robbery. For the same price I got the other version which monitors heart rate as well, from Ebay.

Did any notice or facing issues with amazon.com (usa site) ,I just cant search any product ,it says
"Oops!

We're very sorry, but we're having trouble doing what you just asked us to do. Please give us another chance--click the Back button on your browser and try your request again. Or start from the beginning on our homepage."

Works for me. Tried multiple searches.

I guess its working again now. But it was definitely down before ,since I tried with a VPN and still had the same issue.

This is very unfortunate situation. But let me be honest with you though I do not have any return experiences with Flipkart. Flipkart used to be a great place but not anymore. I have had a couple of experiences where I had a tough time getting my orders delivered in time even after paying extra for delivery services. I almost stopped ordering from Flipkart these days as the frustration still stays behind my mind. Their great customer care from earlier days won them a lot of business but I am sure that a lot of people are now moving away just because of the pathetic attitude and policies.