EDIT 1st July 2013
I contacted La Redoute global customer care about status of rock.in and rejoice! From their response it seems that most likely rock.in will be back soon. Please refer below:
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Dear Customer,
thank you for your e-mail.
We know that this site is Work in progress in order to open again.
At the moment we don’t have others informations about.
Best Regards,
Valeria
La Redoute.com
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I’m not sure what happened to this site. Numerous Google searches have turned up nothing and all saved links I had of various pages from rock.in seem down since at least a month. Hopefully the break is temporary and they will be back because it seemed like a great site.
Since I didn’t get a chance to place an order on this site(I was going to do it after I returned from my holiday, but since I’m back it seems down), I’m only going to share my general experience.
rock.in is the only Indian shopping portal that showcases a lot of popular foreign brands like La Redoute and many others. I used to often check out their collections and they had a wide range of variety that were both fashionable and elegant. Most of all, the type of products they featured weren’t easily available in India, not only brand wise but design wise too. I saw some really amazing blazers, jumpsuits, boots etc and had shortlisted many for later.
Prices - now if you’re buying established brands, that too from abroad, they aren’t going to come cheap. So the prices were of course higher than what you’d normally be comfortable paying for. But rock.in provided decent discounts regularly and big ones during clearance sales.
Shipping - the products located in India/available onsite required 2-3 days shipping. Other products required few days based on where they are located. eg. something ordered that is located in France typically took 14-20 days.~ this is what the site said, since I never ordered anything I’ve no idea how true this is.
Site - the site was user friendly and fairly responsive. All items were neatly categorized and they even had regular blog updates about ongoing trends, fashion advise etc.
Customer care - I called customer care once to talk about their return polices and the CCE on call was cordial and polite. He seemed well informed and provided the details accurately. The customer care number connects quickly with pretty much little/no waiting period.
Returns - rock.in provides returns for products if you don’t like them for some reason or have size issue like most sites do. If their reverse pick up is available on your pin code it will be picked by the company however in other cases you’ll have to ship the item back yourself and shipping will be refunded. this was one of the downfalls of this site as they didn’t seem to have reverse pick up available for even my pin code which is a very common location in my city judging by which I doubt reverse pick up is available in many locations. And irrespective the shipping refund, sending items back by yourself is just risky!
The verdict:
With rock.in currently down for who knows how long, its future looks bleak. The site had shown promise and the few reviews from buyers I had come across regarding the site were positive so I really hope they get back with a bang. But unless that happens there really isn’t much to say about rock.in.