Please read this review carefully, this might save you a lot of money and pain!
I was looking for good headphones for my mobile. I thought of buying Bose IE2 headphones.While searching online I came across shopclues. My jaws dropped when I saw the amount of discount offered is 92%! The original price in market is rs 8990/- while shopclues was offering the same product to me at Rs. 675/-( Please see the attached screenshot). I immediately thought that something fishy is going on here and decided to cross check on the same.
I called Bose India customer care to inquire about whether it is really possible for the company to offer such a huge discount on the product( Bose being a luxury and exclusive market segment). But since it was Sunday today, the call wasn’t connected to the customer care of Bose India.
Then I called Shopclues customer care . I asked the lady on the other side that how it is possible for the company to offer this much discount? She gave me very stereotypical answers like - " We directly ship the product from Manufacturer, so we can offer these discounts.blah blah" . She asked me not to worry and place the order . When I asked her whether the product is genuine, she told me that shopclue serves to different types of buyers so they keep both the type of products -
1) genuine Product with high price
2) Counterfeited(Fake) product with low price
Then I told her that even if they offer fake products online, they can’t keep the same brand name of the product with exact specifications because it will be illegal. To this, she didn’t have any answer(May be she knew that a fraud is being run in her company under her nose). She further asked me to read the description of the product and said if its written in description that the product is genuine, it is genuine and if the description says otherwise, then its counterfeited. Bose IE2 headphones description clearly said that those are OEM(Original Equipment Manufacturer) product but 92% discount was too much to digest!
I then found the seller’s number on that page and thought of calling the seller to know his version of story. Luckily the number was picked up on the other side and when I started speaking about the price and quality of headphones, he said "Sir, its good that you have called me. I will tell you what is really happening! "
The story which came out was like this - The man who picked up the phone used to sell genuine products on shopclues till sometimes back. But recently he started getting a lot of calls/mails from the angry customers complaining about his products being fake. He was shocked at this because he had not sold those products to anybody. Then he checked shopclues product pages. To his surprise, a lot of fake sellers had copied the product name and description from his shopclues page and started selling counterfeited products(But giving his email id/phone number for customer support) . Knowing this fraud happening, he took up the issue with shopclues, but those guys didn’t do anything because shopclues is only concerned about their share of commission.They don’t give a damn about the quality and customer’s grievances. After being fed up, he discontinued his association with shopclues.( But he told that still he is getting daily at least 40-50 calls/mails from the customers complaining about fake products they have bought). He also told me that even if it is proved that its a duplicate/stolen/illegal product, shopclues management can’t be legally taken to task because in their contract with sellers, shopclues puts the clauses so that the entire liability of the product quality lies with the sellers, not shopclues . So they go Scott-free with their commission.Other online retailers like Flipkart, snapdeal, amazon take responsibility for the quality and force their sellers to maintain the same(But not Shopclues)!
So friends, I request you to not fall for shopclues’ scam of "big discounts" and buy products from other reliable online retailers to avoid pain later on .
P.S. - phone number of the seller whom I talked to is 09033-738-731. If you don’t believe me, call this person, he is kind enough to explain to you everything.( Have a look at the screenshots to see that this number is displayed on product page of Shopclues) .
Thanks,
Pankaj