I would strongly recommend anybody wanting to shop at Fabmart.com, NOT to do so. I wanted to buy a audio CD : The One And Only by Zakir Hussain and Adnan Sami. Upon searching through google.com I landed up at Fabmart.com. On August 15 and placed an order for this CD filling in my Credit Card number. On the same day itself I received an e-mail confirming my order.
Out of the blue, on August 26, I received the following e-mail.
Dear Hiten Mehta,
We confirm that your order # 19776643 placed on Wednesday, August 15,
2001 has been cancelled.
Reason: Requested by customer
We have instructed the bank to reverse the transaction.
Warm regards,
V. S. Ramesh
Vice President – Fulfillment
I immediately replied as under .
RE : ORDER NUMBER : 19776643
I got this e-mail message (as under) that this order was cancelled upon my request.
I have NOT cancelled the order. Is my account been hacked? is your security system so fragile? kindly
remove/delete all my details including my Credit Card number from your database.
Please confirm the deletion of ALL DETAILS within the next 3 days or else I shall have no options but to instruct
my Credit card bank NOT to honour ANY transaction from you in future.
Hiten
This is the clarification I received on August 26.
Dear Mr. Mehta,
Thank you for shopping at Fabmart.
Sir, in response to your mail, with regard to order number 19776643, we regret to inform you that the order has
been cancelled, the cancellation of the same having being done by you.
With regard to your query on site security, we would like to assure you that your credit card number, though
available with us is kept confidential. We realise that any breach of this extremely confidential information would
not only affect you but would tarnish our reputation equally if not more.
You may have observed that we ask for an additional list of information namely ’’Date of Birth’’, which enables us
to cross check the credibility of orders. We do make random verifications of orders placed from our banking
partners. The credit card data during transmission is totally encrypted, so the possibility of hacking of this
information is non-existent.
Finally we would also like to inform you that we’d be moving to an online payment mode (like its done with Citibank Suvidha at present where the customer is taken directly to the Citibank site for the payment details, in addition to the transaction being PIN based) even for credit cards in the near future.
Should you require any further clarification or assistance please do contact us.
We look forward to your frequent visits on out stores.
Warm Regards
Fabmart Customer Service.
Once again I sent them the following reply on August 27.
I am absolutely certain that I have NOT cancelled the order. Hence, either there is a security lapse on your server, or there is mismanagement. In either cases I would not like to continue your having ANY, I repeat ANY, details of myself in your database. I would apreciate if you earased every detail of my account including the Credit Card Number.
I don’t care if the order remains cancelled. There are many other ways of buying the item I ordered.
Thanking you, in anticipation of propmt co-operation.
Hiten
Since then I have had no response from them. I checked with my credit card bank, and they informed me I had already been charged Rs.205/- for the CD. Till date the transaction has no been “reversed” as they claim in their “cancellation” mail. I hope the above correspondence will be of help to any potential shopper at Fabmart.com
I had tried buying the same CD, at Fabmart.com earlier, it was available, but I was not able to complete the entire ’’procedure’’ (may be it was because I had a slow connection at that time), next time round I tried, they did not hacve the CD in stock. Later, I tried 2 or 3 times again, each time it was ’’out of stock’’. I have a hunch, that they are ’’out of stock’’ again and dont want to admit it and are putting the ’’cancellation’’ on my head.