Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

Jubilant Foods recently went post IPO so the revenue pressure seems to be there , today we ordered some stuff from Dominos Pizza and I decided to order online using some coupon codes I had. I got the pizza soon enough in 30 minutes . This new service by Dominos India seemed amazing at first look.

But I was in for a surprise, an hour later the outlet called me and told me that no coupons were applicable on what I had ordered and asked me to pay even more money equivalent to original price of the items + tax. This call came 1 hour after my order by the way so I was all the way through the pizzas. The difference in price was around a huge difference before and after coupon.

Anyway, I didn’t want to argue so accepted the revised price (handwritten and overwritten). But this just exposes the chinks in Dominos Pizza’s offerings as the online ordering service can be very misleading especially with regards to coupons, you may think you have gotten a bargain but the local outlet can spoil your party. Wont be ordering from Dominos pizza some some time at-least.

Don’t know if the local outlet will pocket the extra money as the printed bill still lists the original price. In any case Jubilant Foods need to get their act together.

If you are a Paypal Indian customer, your life with Paypal is officially over thanks to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Government. You would have received an email to this effect already and would have realised that the Paypal account you so cherished is now just a wormhole to bring money into your bank account. You cannot use your earnings to purchase stuff on the Internet. So you can no longer use the hard earned money from your website to purchase hosting or to pay for the domain name of the said website. Under normal Indian Tax laws, these are perfectly acceptable uses for your earned money and infact are even deducted for the purpose of calculating taxable income from your business/service. The intentions of the Government are pretty clear. They want all this forex in Indian accounts but they dont want to give any leeway to Indians who are earning this money. A sad day in cyberspace for Indians indeed.

In compliance with Indian regulations, if you are selling products and services to customers globally, please review the following important information:

•       Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of    goods and services should be withdrawn to your bank account within 30 days.

•       While making the withdrawal please make sure you select the purpose code that best fits your business.

•       Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India.  This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.

•    If you would like to make purchases on any website that accepts PayPal, you can continue to use any credit card issued by a bank in India.

If you do use an Indian credit card to pay via Paypal it would actually mean double payment of commission to Paypal , once at time of receiving the forex and next time at the time of sending it since Paypal earns a lot through forex rates.

Its not Paypal’s fault though, its obvious the Indian Government and RBI had a larger role to play in this fiasco.

A very good morning to all our readers in the US and a very happy black Friday to you, hopefully you are headed to stores around the country who are selling merchandise at dirt-cheap prices and are taking advantage of fabulous deals all around.

Black Friday is the time to buy the latest electronic gadget, the video game you have been wanting to buy, any household item and quite frankly anything under the earth. Sites like slickdeals etc. will get you the best deals from all these stores.

The friday after the Thanksgiving Thursday is the Black Friday, the concept is yet to catch on in India though, I wasnt able to find any Indian online store offering Black Friday discounts, but a large number of online American stores do So if you are in India and want a black Friday deal, just ring up your relatives in the US and ask them to buy the stuff you want. They can bring it to you when they are coming to India

I know I did that

Among the deals is an Xbox 360 elite system with 7 Game titles for $200, now thats what I call a deal !

For those of you who buy on ebay and think that negative feedback  is a tool to fight against fraudulent sellers, think again. I was recently dis-satisfied with a seller due to the seller failing at all standards. What was more was that the seller didn’t respond to a few of my emails and selectively replied to 1 ignoring others. The transaction was not smooth at all and I had to face a lot of hardship. What was more was that this seller had a history of such sour deals all over the internet. They also deal via mail order catalogues and had a lot of negative feedback. The seller had deliberately stated false information in the listing, shipped late , mis-spelled my address etc..

Anyway, after I left negative feedback, the seller’s sleep vanished, suddenly I was getting calls and all my emails were replied to after the feedback. A week later this seller applied to ebay community court wherein users vote on issues regarding feedback disputes. This seller wrote a 5 line dispute with little info and lies. I exposed these lies in my reply which had a good 12 points.

Here is the fraud support by ebay, the seller is allowed to post another reply to buyer’s feedback justification while the buyer may not post any such thing. The fraudier part is that the buyer cant even see what lies and web the seller has spun. The policy is tilted into the favour of the seller and essentially is against the principle of justice wherein each person should get equal right to present their case.

Also the community court voters seem like disinterested folks who probably cant differentiate between a fly and an elephant. Anyway, I am happy that negative feedback against this seller is swelling everyday. Hopefully ebay will kick him out, but it seems he is using the court to remove other people’s negative feedbacks too.

Just to give you a magnitude of the ebay fraud , this seller had 29 negative feedback in 1 month yesterday, and its only 21 today, this seller seems to have learnt how to bend rules and continue cheating people ignoring the so called good selling policies of ebay. As his volume is high, it seems even ebay is reluctant to take action against this seller.

Seriously Ebay, you need to become better and get rid of this community court hogwash or atleast make it transparent ! Who had a court in which one party doesnt get to see and respond to the other party’s arguments.

DilSeBol is the first company we review in our series on the Indian Customised  Merchandise market. We found the customer care from DilSeBol to be very kind and warm and they were happy to arrange a review item for us

Now for the review :

Firstly, DilSeBol has a very responsive customer service and staff. We got quick replies to all our needs and questions. On the products front they offer everything from T-Shirts, Mugs, Coasters, Tiles  to Caps,Calendars, Key Chains etc. Of course all the products are customisable to your needs.

We ordered a two tone mug from them which is a fairly standard item for most merchandising companies. In-fact we plan to use this product as a benchmark to compare quality and service levels of various online Merchandising companies. We will be judging the companies on a variety of factors.

Continue reading »

Update : By working with Ferns N Petals customer care, we have been able to bring this issue to resolution

Regular readers may remember a previous post on Ferns and Petals. This is in continuation to that, I will give a short recap anyway. So here goes, I had sent a bouquet of flowers to my dad on his birthday via Ferns and Petals‘s official website fnp.in. And it turned out to be one of the worst decisions of my life.

The flowers were decayed and browning, the buds hadnt opened in a number of flowers, they weren’t fresh and to rub salt to our wounds, the design was different from what was on the website. So going ahead, I wrote an email to these guys asking them to replace the flowers, got no response.

Then I filed a Paypal dispute against these thieves, I got a reply after a few days :

We have received a complaint from your side for the below order.

Please advice what will be the best way to correct the mistake done from our vendor side.

Awaiting for your reply.

Thanks and Regards

Amit

This had travelled a large way inside their company , anyway I asked them to send a gift of the same value as the flowers to my dad as compensation and to set things right so that I use their services in the future as well.

But by now they probably realised that Paypal disputes for Significantly not as Described arent handled unless they happened via Ebay, so I never got a reply .

New Update

They replied to me after I sent this link saying that they had never received my earlier mail, they sent my dad a gift of the same value as the flowers I has purchased earlier, my parents confirmed its of good quality. Hence alls well that ends well , maybe I will give them another try later on as eventually the customer care did come through even if it was after many days.