I had ordered a mobile phone to be delivered to my sister in Noida a few months back (I live in Bangalore). The resultant experience made me decide to never again place an order on Indiaplaza due to their insecure financial process and their horrible service.
I paid using a one-time-use credit card number dynamically generated by HDFC’s NetSafe service for Visa cards. NetSafe ensures that the real credit card number does not need to be provided on merchant websites, and therefore offers a much better level of security. I checked the order on Indiaplaza website the next day and noticed that the status was Pending Authorization or something. Tried calling up Indiaplaza customer service but their phone lines were busy all the time. After trying for more than 20 times over the next couple of hours, I could finally speak to a customer care executive who claimed that the bank had declined the transaction, and I should contact the bank. I expressed indignation at the idea and demanded to know if that is the case, how had the payment gateway approved the transaction when I had placed the order. He had no answer. I gave up arguing with him, and called up the bank. The bank had no such transaction on record. Called up Indiaplaza again, and after several attempts, got through to the same executive (Surprise! Unless this was a big coincidence, they don’t have many customer care executives!). He again had no answer. So I demanded to speak to his manager. He put someone else on the line who had no better answers but promised to call me back on Monday (it was Saturday then) after checking with his accounts folks. Monday went by without a call from Indiaplaza. The order was still showing the same status. So I wrote an email to Indiaplaza. A few hours later, I got a call from someone at Indiaplaza who promised to look into the matter and report to me. That day went by and the next, and again no call from Indiaplaza. I wrote another email, this time CCd to the COO. A few hours later, I got another call from Indiaplaza, but they still had no good answer! During these conversations, I came to know that Indiaplaza does not use an online payment gateway for orders above Rs 2000, and they manually call up the bank to verify transactions! This even though their website takes all your credit card information, including CVV and expiry date. The website also asks for your date of birth! They record this information and use it to manually authenticate the transaction. Which means that very critical credit card information is recorded by Indiaplaza and is available to its employees (at least the accounts dept). With that information, anyone can order stuff from Internet websites. I also realized that as I had given them details about a credit card that can only be used on online payment gateways, their manual authentication attempt must have failed. When I pointed this out to Indiaplaza folks, they said that they had not had any credit card misuse case till now!
But my woes did not end there. As I was not ready to provide them with credit card details of a physical card for fear of credit card fraud, I had to give them a cheque. And they did not go ahead with the order for 2 more days till the cheque had not been cleared and the money received in their account.
But my woes did not end there. Finally, they shipped the phone. The phone was delivered at Noida, but my sister, who received the shipment, reported that the phone box was open and the whole packaging was very shabby. So she had refused to accept the shipment. Some more angry emails later, I told Indiaplaza to have the phone delivered to me in Bangalore as I did not want my sister to have to deal with Indiaplaza crap. Indiaplaza agreed, but shipped the phone again to Noida! As I had noticed this on the website of the courier company, I informed Indiaplaza, who recalled the shipment before delivery. Then Indiaplaza did not have the phone in stock. After waiting for some more days, I gave Indiaplaza a deadline of the next day to either deliver the phone to me or refund my money. An Indiaplaza executive personally delivered the phone to me at about 8pm the next evening. He had bought the phone from a local mobile shop to meet my deadline.
So I finally got the phone about 3 weeks after I had placed the order, and delivered to me instead of where I had wanted the phone to be delivered. I have no doubt that the effort I spent dealing with Indiaplaza was enormous compared to the small amount of money I saved as their price was lower than the market price by a few hundred rupees.