The reason why I am writing this review is because I am extremely mad at https://firstandsecond.com for messing with my order; and it isn?t the firt time they have done it. When I saw this site for the first time I was really impressed with the collection they had. I wasn?t too happy with the rates but did not mind paying a little extra for some books that I couldn?t find elsewhere. Moreover finding books in Hong Kong is really difficult so I normally bought online and had them delivered home in India just before my visit.
First of all the site takes ages to load. It is so slow that you will loose patience and decide not to buy books online ever. Secondly they have a system of disabling your account after a fixed period of time. I was using my company email id as the login name and when I changed companies I emailed them asking them to change my contact email id. I gave them a new id but nothing happened.
Moreover I was supposed to use up 7000 rupees (which I had paid to them for a book they never delivered and refused to pay back but asked me to use that money to shop on their site). One day I tried to login as I wanted to buy a few books and thought I would make use of that money. To my horror I could not login and it said my account had expired. Nothing could be done about it. Well I was still dumb enough to order books from their website one more time (frankly I could not find them elsewhere) but they haven?t changed.
I ordered books on 29th mar 2004 as I was going to India in first week of April, I received an email from them today (22nd April) 3 weeks after I have returned to HK that my order has been shipped. The thing that infuriates me the most is that all these books had a mention of ?generally ships in 3-4 days? on the website. How can it then take you 24 days to ship something you promise to ship in 4 days? Is their no limit to overestimation? None of these were exotic books by foreign publishers; they were Indian publications (in fact one of them was a cook book by Sanjeev Kapoor for god?s sake?..) I tried calling their customer service number and blow off some heat but it just rings!!!!! No one picks up.
This is another thing that puzzles me, in a country that provides outsourced solutions for customer service to almost the whole world we have a customer service center where they don?t even have an automated system to pick up their phone.
I have resolved never to shop here again and to try and warn as many people as I can about the perils of shopping at firstandsecond. This is my beginning of the warning process?..