Double check your Infibeam shipment

Here’s one website that’s on its way to become India’s Amazon. Though e-commerce isn’t foreign to Indians with sites like e-bay, Flipkart, Rediff Shopping and Indiatimes Shopping already established, there was immense gap that needed to be bridged with respect to quality of service. The only motive in this market is to gain the trust of the customer and to make sure that when he opens the shipment, there is only one thing on his face, a smile 🙂

I was mighty impressed with its quality of service until Infibeam undid everything with this deal of mine.

I was in search of good earphones to listen music at my workplace. Being a Philips fan, I finalized on Philips SHE1360 on Infibeam. I was not looking for an expensive one because it was meant to be carelessly handled in some corner of my bag. Discounted price tag on Infibeam was 316. Fair enough deal. Ordered it right away.

Infibeam Receipt

As always Infibeam shipped my order within a week. I was as excited as anybody until I opened the multi-layered packaging. To my surprise, the M.R.P (inclusive of all taxes) printed on the product was 150. Now, that is a 110% increase. Which means Infibeam sells products 110% in excess of M.R.P.

M.R.P

I felt cheated. I called up Infibeam customer care seeking explanation. And the response shocked me –

It’s not profitable for us to sell products of this price range at M.R.P. Hence, we bloat up the price and then pretend to offer a discount. We apologize and offer you credit for the excess amount charged.

And within two days, I received a pre-paid credit from Infibeam for 166 which I could use for future purchases.

Pre-paid credit

 So, here are few questions.

1. Are online re-sellers authorized to charge over and above the M.R.P? If it is a shipping charge should it not be mentioned so?
2. What if I had not observed the M.R.P on the product?
3.  Why can’t infibeam refund the amount to my credit card rather than giving me a pre-paid credit?
4. What other action can I possibly take against Infibeam for cheating?
5. Are we really heading towards corruption free India?

Let me know.

The AirTel Shocker

About a month ago I toured Hyderabad, a visit I would remember for a long time for many good reasons. But it was AirTel that gave me a shocker right at the start of the trip. Not long after I boarded the Kacheguda Express, I realised that my mobile was running out of balance and I needed a recharge desperately to be able to stay on Roaming in Andhra. Since there was no way I could recharge onboard, I requested my friend Pramod to recharge INR 200 for my number. Seconds later I got the recharge confirmation SMS from AirTel which made me say WTF!

WTF

MRP Rs. 200.00 for a talktime of Rs. 1.00?!?!?! What age are we living in? In the times where providers give full talktime or infact more than full talktime and have call rates at 29p per minute, this SMS came to me as a shocker. Soon after that the train went into out of coverage area which did not help me one little bit. I could not even call the customer care, nor have any talktime to make my calls or even send SMS-es. FMyLife at that time with me traveling alone amidst Tamil and Telugu co-passengers and having nobody to interact or call someone over the phone.

Travelling alone in a compartment with #Tamil and #Telugu co-passengers. FMyLife.

— Aditya Kavoor (@akavoor) December 23, 2009

Till today I do not know where the money has disappeared nor have any explanation for this. Surely the balance does not reflect upon balance enquiry. So, here is AirTel looting public money and thereby being the costliest mobile service provider in the world.

PS: I have filed a complaint with the AirTel Customer Care and awaiting a response.

Blog Stats Hit – The Great Firewall of China

With Google’s decision to review business operations in China has been sudden and surprising, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences which may mean having to shut down Google.cn, and their offices in China. Not very long after such a decision, the consequences have already started affecting Statistics and Hits across the Web. Something like WordPress  has one million Chinese visitors to their various blogs disappear, accounting for about a quarter of all traffic, and incidentally my blog has not been let free as well. It too has taken a beating as Google was the main source of redirection via search to my Blog in Asia and elsewhere.

The Great Fall of the stats

Clearly, the graph speaks for its own and needs no explanation. In the past two days visitors to my blog have considerably decreased and China’s traffic is not something one can ignore. With both parties striving to emerge winners in this battle of profits to each of them, People and Internet are at loss.

Dear Google, please give my guests back. Thank you.

Advertisement: IIT Bombay, Techfest 2010

Techfest is the annual science and technology festival of IIT Bombay. It is the largest of its kind in Asia. In an endeavor to promote Science and Technology in India they had started an initiative named Nexus in 2006. Under this initiative they conduct events in different regions of the country. This year Nexus will be held at 5 centers in India.

Northern Region : NSIT Delhi
Southern Region : NIT Calicut
Eastern Region : NIT Rourkela
Western Region : IIT Bombay
Central Region : MITM Indore

The competition this year is based on wireless communication between robots. It is an extremely fascinating field with a number of applications. IIT Bombay’s Techfest will conduct this competition there and invite the top 3 teams to IIT Bombay to participate alongside winners from other centers in another competition named A.N.T.Z. The winners of A.N.T.Z will get to represent India in the Techfest World Challenge where in participants from our International Nexus centers would come. The international Nexus centers are at Australia, Thailand and Srilanka.

Wishing good luck to the Techfest team. For more information contact:

Hitesh Lalwani
Manager, Events
Techfest (2009-10)
IIT Bombay
+91 99679 30312
www.techfest.org

Download the Press Release here.

A hundred thousand page views

In just over 18 months of its existence this blog has received a hundred thousand page views. It really amazes me that a lakh people have found something interesting and visit back on a regular basis.

My sincere thanks to those who spend a lot of their valuable time on this blog commenting and discussing matters that would directly or indirectly influence other readers. While most people just take benefits and never return once their task is done or the information they need is found, submitting a thank you would not take much effort. On the other hand there have been readers who actively post comments which on a few ocassions have resulted in mild flame wars (which I enjoy). Keep them coming folks. There are also instances where I have not replied to some requests via comments/email as many a times the answer would be in the previous comments. Please spare some time to read them before asking. That said if a comment really needed a reply I would definitely not miss out on that. Special thanks to Akismet for blocking spam and making my life easier.

My journey with WordPress has been wonderful. Matt and his team are doing a wonderful job to provide new features that makes WordPress the world’s best blogging software. For example WordPress released a bunch of features under a week on which I recently twittered.

Finally, no matter who you are and why you are here I extend my sincere thanks to you for visiting this blog and inspiring me to write more. Do keep coming back as I have much more interesting stuff in store for you. Incase you feel I should write about a topic feel free to contact me. For the time being its time to celebrate the six figured stats. *Drumrolls*