Amazon — Marketing gimmick or System failure?
Here is the story of my experience with Amazon, India. I must admit that I had great respect for Amazon until I became the victim of it.
It’s festive time in India, and major e-commerce sites (Amazon, Flipkart) are competing against each other to grab market share by offering discounts on various products to attract the customers.
Amazon is running “Great Indian Festival” sale while Flipkart is running “Big Billion Days” sale campaign.
Like every other customer, I wanted to checkout any attractive offers are there. I decided to buy “Strontium Nitro Plus Nano 64GB USB 3.0 Pen Drive” from Amazon which is getting sold at 700 Rupees compared to actual price 2500 Rupees. That seems like a very good deal for me, so I went ahead and placed an order and expecting it to be reached within 5 days. The day was about to end with happiness.
In the night, I received an email and message that my order is cancelled and refunded the amount which I paid for the order. I was bit shocked, never experienced order cancellation in my entire online purchase history. I thought it might be due to out of stock or Amazon wasn’t able to fulfill because of mouth watering deal it has sold for. I went back to site and checked the product and it was not available as I expected.
I was going through deals again and found that the same product is now getting sold for 500 Rs and this seems like the super deal for me. I would have cursed my luck if I purchased it for 700 rs and now the same product is getting sold for 500 Rs. Without wasting any time, went ahead and placed an order for 500 Rs.
Another day passed, and I received a mail saying that “order is cancelled and refunded”. Now this is double shock, and went gone through the details and surprisingly cancellation email contains no information why it’s cancelled. I opened the product page and found that it’s still being sold even after a day.
Quickly I called support center and they asked me to drop a mail with all the details. I have received formal mail that we will update you on this.
I didn’t get any further response on this nor the reason behind the cancellation even after 3 days.
Last night, I got a notification saying that product is online again and selling at 700 Rs. This time, I decided to buy this item to see what’s going behind the scenes. I was determined that order is going to be cancelled for sure as it’s almost impossible to sell this product at 700 Rs while it’s market price is 2500 Rs.
But I wanted to give one more chance and see if it’s total failure of Amazon or just a marketing gimmick to attract the customers to place orders during the festive season. Finally decided to place an order for the same and expecting it to be cancelled sooner or later. In the mean time, I called customer care for update on the cancellation story.
This is what I have received in response mentioning that “Pricing error and technical glitch”.
I quickly called up Customer care mentioning that, it’s totally acceptable if the item was sold at wrong price for brief period of time, but the product is getting listed every day by different sellers for 700Rs, 500Rs. Either there’s fundamentally something going wrong with these sellers (3 orders confirmed by 3 different sellers) or Amazon is not playing the “gimmicks” to attract customers during the festive season and cancel the orders for “technical glitch”.
The response which I received from Escalation team is “ Sir, we don’t have a system for controlling the prices which are listed in Amazon. Sellers can sell at any price and we will not be able to validate that. The last order which you have places is also going to be cancelled today”. The last line from the support center totally taken me to different level in this experience and I requested her to please drop me the mail with the same information and trust me they never did nor ready to do.
More than decade of e-commerce experience, market leader like Amazon really can’t validate the fraud listing of prices? or Is Amazon trying to deceive customers to place orders during the competition season for market figures and later cancelling them for no reason?
Adding to this, the cancellation email has link to give feedback. I was really frustrated to see that the feedback link for cancelled order doesn’t even work. It redirects me to the page where I can provide feedback for orders which are already in shipment or delivered. Product owner who is owning might have never cancelled an order and tried giving feedback. Kudos to quality.
If someone from Amazon is reading this, please pack your bags if this is going to continue. Indian market is so fragile, once you lose the customer trust, neither they give second chance for you nor the competitors.
PS: I am still loyal Amazon prime customer and it doesn’t mean you can take customers for granted. If one can’t learn from mistakes, they will become part of history.
References of Flipkart and Amazon boasting their numbers during the sale time