I noticed (as did others as well) that in recent times I have been doing a whole lot of purchases online. I generally buy books and a little bit of music so I thought I can share some experiences with online retailing and a few retailers in India. In no particular order, here goes:
- big online presence supplemented by being the back-end various *shopping portals
- landing page is much too cluttered
- good selection of books
- reasonably good selection of other items (haven’t bought any from there)
- search engine is unstable – throws up lots of irrelevant results
- an unexpectedly bad customer service that doesn’t have a RT (or like system)
- packaging quality of consignments are uneven and generally going down
- the inventory does not catch “Out of Stock” items quickly (one can actually still order them and wait for refund)
- a bare site design – functional and pretty fast
- good selection of books and details associated with each book is accurate
- good quality of packaging
- path to cart is short and easy
- search engine needs some love – throws up irrelevant results
- doesn’t have a recommendation thing (“those who bought F00 also bought Bar”) thing yet
- not many user reviews of books
- no tie in with Goodreads
- average customer service (nothing exceptional that is)
- not all payment gateways are functional at this point
- landing page has too many moving images / bright colors
- path to cart is short and easy
- good selection of Indian Independent Music
- not so good selection of other kinds of music
- the emphasis on movie DVD is a bit odd
- awesomely good customer service
- search engine needs love – times out more often than not
- not too many reviews on the site – user feedback needs to be worked upon
- doesn’t seem to work with Firefox, worked with Konqueror but barely
- a range of selection of books and journals
- path to cart is complicated (asks for far too much detail than required to complete shopping)
- payment gateway is sluggish at best
- search functionality is better than other online book retailers but requires improvement
- currency details are overdone and that level of details is jarring
Most of the portals seem to suffer from not being designed with the “online” experience in mind. More like the traditional over-the-counter experience being somewhat morphed into the semblance of online. The other additional aspect is that none of them work on creating a social network around their portals which would lead to a community of loyal users. Which in a way is very strange given that it is a good thing to do.
And in a completely unrelated news, SCIM is up for translation.