I have bought a few products such as glassware among others from Pepperfry and during the earlier days after its launch, the discounts and the cashback offers were as advertised.
However in recent times it has been observed that the ads are too overwhelmingly exaggerated like "upto 85% off" for so and so festive sales. When you click the link, the "discounts" will seldom be more than 30% and there might be one utterly useless product coming close to that exaggerated "upto" mark.
Add to it, the number of spam mails that come from Pepperfry are irritating to say the least. Besides there is this so called wallet - that is another deceptive marketing.
So here is how it works. They claim to have sent you surprise coins or whatever it is called for a substantial amount like 5000 or more. Normally you would assume that the wallet balance can be used in full to buy something. That doesn’t happen. The T&C says you can use a very miniscule percentage of the wallet and that too not in entirety. It has to be a miniscule percentage of the total order value. Not just this but this wallet redemption can be done only on some products.
So the trickery is this, you get lured to buy something, start browsing and zero-in on something. You get prepared to buy it keeping a certain budget in mind. Eventually what shocks you is that you will never get it as per what you assume it will be. The wallet credits are practically unusable. The inflated discounts don’t always show up in the end because the taxes don’t reflect there but yet after having wasted hours in finding a product you need, the final price is considerably high. Usually temptation takes over and you just pay what the final price turns out to be.
Another problem with this site is that many of the items shown are simply very ordinary furniture and the sellers manage to obtain fascinating photos giving the items a very premium look. But what you get in the end is a product which if you take the effort to visit some furniture markets in your town, you will find at 1-4th the price. I had bought a very luxurious looking wardrobe which was said to be dismantlable. That "dismantlable" feature is an overstatement. The product needs to be assembled using tools and drill machines. As a matter of fact the person who came to assemble had to use hammer and ordinary nails to put together most of the components. There was no instruction manual nor adequate accessories to enable you to do it yourself. Agreed, it is the manufacturer’s fault. But perhaps it is time for furniture e-tailers to rather begin manufacturing their own furniture or at least inspect the products being advertised by their sellers. Many of these "studios" sellers pretend to make it appear as though they are great designers or artists making classy vintage style furniture on their own but what they sell is simply items bought off the footpath from furniture markets and photographed aesthetically.
PS: The review for this site is forcing me to put an order number. I hence had to put one of the orders I was able to locate but fully related to this review.