While the whole e-commerce thing may not be something new for the western countries, it is certainly one of the newer concepts in Pakistan that has only recently started to get its place in the limelight of social acceptance. That being said, online retailers in the country still have a very long way to go before as most of them still carry the stagnant mentality that the customer doesn’t know anything and can be cheated.
To the retailers, that is just another way for making more money by delivering subpar products or simply not having a proper check and balance system but what most of them don’t realize is that these kind of shenanigans serve only to hurt them in the longer run by only adding to the “horror stories” of online shopping in Pakistan. For those who are not aware of Daraz.pk, its a venture backed and financed by Rocket Internet.
Today, I came across such another story while browsing my newsfeed on Facebook. A friend of mine who recently started shopping online at Daraz.pk was downright furious at their customer services skills as he was experiencing a delay in the delivery of his newly bought TV set. Of course if it was only that I would have had ignored the story and moved on as delays in any business are usual and can happen due to a myriad of reasons. However, this story was different. As my friend pointed out, the online retailer had indeed delivered the appliance in question on March 13th the only thing was that the LED TV came broken out of the box. Again, accidents happen so he simply asked for a replacement which to this day is still to be delivered as Daraz took almost a week to recall the broken appliance back for inspection and now were having their highly trained Holmesian detectives look over the almost daunting case of the broken LED TV.
Now, I don’t know about you but personally his story only helped to discourage me from ever shopping from Daraz.pk and I am certain to say that it would do the same for others as well. For you see, this is not something that is easily ignorable, as poor customer support only results in driving business away and strengthen the stigma of our people that online retailers are nothing but a bunch of crooks who will cheat you out of your cash. If you ever take a look at the success of e-stores such as Amazon or Ali Baba, you will notice that these stores always put the needs of their customers first. Granted, these retailers have had come across these kind of problems before but the thing is that they often provide a work around which makes the customer happy, this work around may very well be a personalized apology call or allowing the consumer to send back the defected product back to them without any charges or even something as simple as a free gift card.
At the end all I can do is to ask Daraz, if they ever read this, kindly pay more attention to the customer relations as these kind of incidents only serve as a determent to anyone who comes across them.
Related Story: Pakistan: Rocket Internet Startup Paying Bloggers to Publish Content in their favor
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Daraz.pk, Daraz Online Shopping, Daraz Reviews, Daraz.pk Products
