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Good news for online shoppers. Amazon has launched Amazon Global Store for India. We can now access products sold by Amazon worldwide. Shoppers can now breath a sigh of relief when it comes to "Returns" as it is handled by Amazon locally.

@ottocycle You beat me by a sec :D

Hi Friends ,

I am sharing my very recent experience of the gifting site www.giftease.com

As the name suggests it looks like a professional gifting portal. But to my horror they turned out to be unprofessional and have missed out on the very concept of gifting.

Let me describe. For this Diwali 2016 , I booked some 18 orders all for my clients. The gifts started reaching their destination , no problem with that. But the blunder was that no gift had the sender's name anywhere ( i.e. my name ) and the receivers kept wondering who was the sender. But at the same time they did not forget to put their own name and other promotional material to give a feel as if the gift was sent by them. This is not all , the boxes also had invoices inside the parcel all though I had paid full in advance by net banking and had specified my own address as billing address. They had special field to do so. So the shipping address and the billing address was separate and different. I tried to contact their customer numbers but that was never answered. The fellow on the live chat was completely useless and did not understand and my concern at all.

Thus my clients received the gifts with an Invoice and came to know about the sender when i called actually them and told them that such and such gift was sent by me. This was the most awkward thing to do.

regards
Amol

Very limited options. I was particularly interested in electronic items and accessories which are cheaper yet robust in the US market but I guess its going to take a while before they expand their selection.

Yes, I do agree with you completely. Also I feel Amazon search needs fine tuning. Most of the times the search results are not what I expect.

There is probably a term for it, but I'll call it search spamming --- where dozens of virtually identical items (differing, for instance, in being listed once for every imaginable car model) drown out everything else. I hate that!

Please check this surprising price jacking situation with Amazon and lightning deal.
http://www.amazon.in/dp/B013FV2GUC/r...A346O6G70QHTSW

They have increased the regular price from 4599 to 5490 and are showing a lightning deal price of 5200. The seller is different but I see no logic in how they can mark this item as a lightning deal and show a higher price.
Both of these are open on separate tabs of my browser and both screenshots are from one hour back. I have added the lower price to my cart and it is still available at that lower price.

One, it's no surprise. Two, it's a fairly common e-commerce tactic (at least in India) and most importantly Three, don't bother complaining because they'll just give you some BS runaround about 'pricing review' and do zilch to fix it.

Get the best deal you can and move on.

Yep, I wrote the post so people realize that lightning deals are not necessarily real discounts and to be wary of the pricing. In this case, it is significantly more - ~20% higher than normal price.

Amazon sells ONLY through Cloudtail. If you find price jacking on Cloudtail, then its Amazon's fault. Two different sellers on Amazon (being a marketplace), can certainly have different prices & discounts. This is common & happens across many items, nothing surprising at all.

I always use the buyhatke price graph to check if the price drop is real - it is a very nifty addition and helps to have a quick glance at historical pricing data.

--Anoop

The first listing (lower price) was cloudtail and lightning deals are decided by amazon and not another seller. How can the lightning deal price be above the price of what cloudtail is selling it for?
BTW, all I am trying to do here is to caution the casual buyer to be wary of lightning deal prices...

Thanks Anoop, the buyhatke is a good reference point, I havent used it myself yet but plan to start using it.

Some of the listings in the amazon site are insanely ridiculous. Take for example this product called 'Herbal Helmet' whose MRP as listed by Cloudtail is 1500/- and in the lightning deal it is available for 87/- at a whopping discount of 94%. (Oh Really??)

Don't the MRP's of a product have any regulation of sorts?

I think Amazon decides what the lightning deal is, but it is up to the seller to device which all SKUs to include in the deal. In this case it seems to me the seller chose to include this printer without realizing that his post-lightning price (20% off MRP) is higher than Cloudtail's regular price (30% off MRP).

I suppose it is tough for sellers to beat Cloudtail with its deep pockets on pricing alone.

Take a look at this one from amazon, price shows 758/- and it is on sale for 339/-. But this product has a price tag which shows MRP 364/-.

I have reported it, but still no change!

As per Indian law, MRP can be absolutely anything. Even 1 lakh for this item. Ultimately, final charged price cannot exceed that, thats all. Amazon should instead show the discount on the regular price, not MRP, that will show a more truer picture.