Why the Nepalese eCommerce industry is not gearing up timely?
I proffer a quick disclaimer before you read this post. The single specimen in this post is the emerging player in the Nepalese E-commerce industry, Daraz Online Shopping, and like my last post, the insights are drawn from my own experience using the product. I don’t have expertise, nor I have done any level of investigations in this domain.
Online shopping has nearly become synonymous with “Daraz” among the Nepalese millennials who use e-commerce platforms at least to compare prices of products: credit to its aggressive marketing, extensive reach, and instant online support.
Yes, I firmly believe the chat support channel has done an incredible job providing hassle-free customer support, a healthy CRM and ultimately the business scaling. The instant support is one of the main reasons I favor Daraz over other electronic commerce platforms. They are most likely the trendsetters providing real-time support with dedicated advisors in the customer-support sphere in Nepal, and this initiative is praiseworthy. The static support via messenger/email plugin in other products is more like medicine after death as inquiries are acknowledged stalely only on the availability of advisors. Their claim: “We have live chat assistance” is nothing more than an eye-catching novelty as it fails to serve the purpose of the true live support.
One place where this thriving Alibaba group-owned company has disappointed me, however, is in its operations management. After shopping for a few times on this platform, I’ve listed some observations about how Daraz executes its business operations, and what can be bettered.
1) Routine Quality Check on Sellers
The seasonal sale, “12.12” kicked in with an additional 15% promotional discount on selected bank cards. I thought of leveraging this deal and placed an order for 64 Gigs Toshiba’s memory stick which was in my want list for sometime. Unfortunately, that order had to be returned as a different and malfunctioning product had been shipped. Yes, the new memory stick which was displayed with different product pic and impressive labels of transfer speed with warranties on the product page happened to be a disguise for a cheap item with poor built, and the worst of all, it didn’t work at all.
You must be thinking “Hey! Daraz is just a platform connecting sellers and buyers, why are you accusing it of the consequences? Well here is why; the product already had a review on the page which metaphorically states, “A different product has been delivered.”
This arises the question “Is there a Quality Control department in Daraz, and if there is, why aren’t they doing their job properly ?” Merchants like aforementioned should’ve been banned to sell or maybe have their products delisted. I don’t know what policies Daraz has for this, but they’ve definitely failed to scrutinize. I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of other items like these with deceiving product pictures and descriptions. The stereotype “Delivered products are nowhere near to the displayed products” is not a new cliche in the global online shopping ecosystem, but Daraz, how big is your merchant base in Nepal? Is it that tough to run a methodical quality check and do the needful against a few thousand sellers?
I had placed the order even after seeing the warning review, in a hope that item delivered to the reviewer was just a blunder and failing to notice the reply notification from the seller. No email for the reply notification and message icon in the app’s Navbar is a one-stop notifier that notifies all sorts of gibberish marketing prompts. It’s complicated to segregate the real messages from the chunk. You need to work on the product UX as well Daraz!
For my inquiry on the product, the seller had replied, “Both products (Displayed and Sold) have the same chip, just the shapes of the products are different”. Daraz, what’s your take on the seller openly admitting products (displayed and sold) have different shapes? Let’s forget about the shape, I can guarantee that the item I received was not even the first copy of Toshiba’s product while the product description stated otherwise. Such a poor finishing and shoddy built! Why don’t you cut these kinds of sellers out of the platform? It’s about your brand image after all.
Don’t you have any policies regarding the merchants selling “Different Shaped Products” like this? Because next on my observation, I am going to shed a light on your policy on the Review section.
2) Timely operations
What are the edges of online shopping over a traditional one? Convenient, more options, cheaper, price comparison, and product insight ( from reviews).
Reviews! I am confident that most of us at least skim through the ratings and reviews before ordering in order to get the picture of the product and stay on the safe side. But did you know, it takes 7–15 days for the shopper’s review to get reflected on the Daraz’s product page? Understandable… They should be getting billions of shoppers reviews daily, so it’s taking the team this long to go through each of them, verify and approve with a button click on the back end. Don’t you think so?
Nowadays even governmental works are completed within a max of a few days, and here is the country’s largest private e-commerce company which takes up to 15 days to approve a genuine review. I wonder how many more shoppers have fallen for this “Premium chip with a slightly different shape than displayed” product while my review is still pending, screaming out there to get the approval which could have waved a red flag to the buyers and saved them from getting the fraudulent product.
3) Refund Policy
I spoke with the customer support executive to express my dissatisfaction with the quality control as this was already my second time returning the wrong product out of three times that I have shopped on Daraz. The executive kindly apologized on behalf of Daraz to make sure that it doesn’t change my brand perception, and also confirmed to me that refund would be processed within 7–10 days.
I became overwhelmed with the triumphant feeling that I am getting my money back after 10 days. I mean, isn’t it very kind of them that just in 10 days I get my own money back, wherein I could have walked into any local stores and bought a genuine item within 2 minutes? Thanks for keeping my 14,398 minutes (10*24*60 -2) on hold to purchase a single item. It’s not really solving a problem but adding yet another pain point on shoppers.
While I certainly realize that there is a hefty financial process of banks and auditing transactions, but does it truly take that long? It never took me more than 2–3 working days to get refunds while returning products on “Amazon.in” They too have the buffering window of up to a week for processing refunds, and I am sure they have to undergo a similar process as well. My same question as above, how large user base do you have in Nepal Daraz and how many refunds do you initiate per day?
With these observations highlighted, I’d like to tell my readers that I am not Daraz’s detractor, in fact, I’d really like to see Daraz and other big and small eCommerce platforms do well in near future to reshape the Nepalese eCommerce ecosystem. Yes, we have a small geographical area and a very small user base, but isn’t it an advantage over other countries for the companies to manage the operations efficiently and set an exemplary user satisfaction in the global e-commerce market?
People’s perception needs to change towards online shopping for the industry to be well-adapted, and it will surely take time. They are slowly but surely getting the awareness of its benefits, and Daraz, who is enjoying the eCommerce monopoly should leave the righteous benchmark among people for the welfare of its own and the whole ecosystem in Nepal. I understand the operations execution system can’t be changed overnight, especially the time factor, but it can definitely be improved over time.
I am excited to hear about the collaboration between India’s e-commerce unicorn Flipkart and Nepalese local player Sasto Deal. Looking forward to seeing how it impacts the Nepalese e-commerce industry.
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I am sorry for making this very long 🙏🏼 I couldn’t find more places to trim the content. Thanks for reading, and have an amazing rest of the day ahead!
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