I am a novice shopper specially when it comes to online, I wanted to buy some books and luckily I chose flipkart to serve me. First of all I was very afraid as I was well aware of online frauds and stuff if you have an online banking account, money is transferred in a flash to the account you mentioned so it’s bit creepy as there is no place for mistakes [no undo options].
I will review flipkart in following points:
1) Website design and layout: Very intuitive design everything is on the webpage, creating account is very simple and searching for the books is really fast if you know author’s name or even half of the book name.
2) Choosing a book : If you have chosen a book the page will display the book is available in the warehouse or not and how much delivery time it is going to take, there is also a intimate me button if the book is not available, an alert will be sent to your mail if book is available again.
3) Payment options : Visa credit Card, Master credit Card, Demand Draft, Cheque and Internet banking from all major banks. And there is free shipping of you books.
Using credit cards and Internet banking transfers are very safe to use on this site as I have used them and still I got no problems.
4) Order Status: You can always keep track of your order and payment confirmations.
5) After sells/Customer Service : Customer Service is very good and helpful if you have any queries you can mail them.
My case: I ordered a wrong and costly book by mistake, after payment I realized it. I just mailed their CS and a nice guy got back to me and helped me a lot and changed the order, replaced the book with one I wanted and refunded [transferred] the remaining balance to my bank account.
So these guys came out to be pretty well and helped me with the best they could.
[I even scolded them for mailing me after 2 days reporting of my problem but they apologized for the delay].
6) Delivery : Deliveries are done by major courier companies and as your order is dispatched you are alerted by a mail and they also give you a tracking ID to track your order. As you can see in my attached pics book came in a nice study carton and book was a fresh copy not the old as they claim and rest you can observe from the pics. But the replaced book is on its way as it was an imported edition. This book is just half of my placed order. In the carton I also found a discount voucher which expires on a particular date and can be used many times as I wish to and bill of the current book.
My final verdict: Guys if you want to but some online books you can surely use flipkart.
But my advice will be to compare the prices of book on all other websites as well, because sometimes it makes a huge difference. e.g. take my book
https://flipkart.com/adobe-photoshop-cs4-classroom-book/032157379x-vtw3f9vm07
and on rediff :
https://books.rediff.com/book/adobe-creative-team/adobe-photoshop-cs4-classroom-in-a-book/ISBN:032157379X/83630539
See the difference!!
So guys before online shopping do a research about the prices of the merchandise.
You can also search books in nbcindia and indiatimes shopping.