Snapdeal.com –
Snapdeal started as a Groupon clone, a regular daily deal website. Gradually, it has evolved into a complete e-commerce store. I had bought a few deals before, so didn’t think too much about ordering a few products.
Payment:
I paid by credit card. I know it will come naturally to many to choose cash on delivery. But I was spending a nominal amount and wanted my reward points.Order confirmation:
Once you place the order, you can jump to the my orders page and see the status for each of the products. The tracking works down to the last detail, tells you the status at every checkpoint.
Packaging:
Of all the sites I ordered from, Snapdeal had the most excessive packaging. Safe and secure, yes, but very excessive. Ten of the products I ordered the first time were sent in 3 different packages, all wrapped within a print out of the bill, bubble wrap and branding outer paper. If they can sort out the packaging and streamline the logistics, they will cut out a lot of wastage. If you think I am being a pain about the packaging, I am not the only one. Farhad Manjoo has a great post on how product packaging has improved.
Overall experience:
My experience was really good for the ten products, but I had also ordered twelve. There was no update on the last two for more than a week. So, I wrote to them inquiring the status. I got a reply saying they were too sorry but they were too overwhelmed with the response! Is that another way of saying they were understaffed?
Two days later, I wrote back asking if there was an update. I got exactly the same mail. I waited a day and wrote back requesting them to deliver the products. Just to emphasize how serious I was, I also put in a small post script that if they were unable to deliver, I will like to be refunded. I got a single line reply that a refund has been forwarded. I kept mailing that I still wanted the product if they had it, but no luck, they had put me on an auto responder.