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Comment by pkd | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's service is head and shoulders above any other ecommerce player in India. Despite its late entry, it has largely replaced Flipkart as the provider of choice. This is almost exclusively due to the stellar service and customer support from Amazon. I've had to deal with customer support multiple times due to rescheduling delivery or returns, and have had a 100% pleasant experience. Compared to Flipkart, where the customer support people have very little to zero idea about every non trivial problem, it's amazing how Amazon has been functioning.

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Indeed! Amazon does top-notch customer service at scale like nobody else. Everyone else just assumes that it is impossible to scale up something like this and they let the a previously great experience slip as they grow into a faceless organization. Good business is all about getting these hard things to scale.

Actually I've had 1 unpleasant experience out of 3 so far. I wanted to buy an item at a lower cost(because it was a lot cheaper on other sites) and asked an exec about the same. He could've said something like "Just monitor the prices, they might come down" and I would've done it, instead he said "I'll personally keep a tab on the prices for you and will intimate you in case the price falls to your expectations". While it definitely looked like a false promise, I assumed from all the online reviews that he actually would follow up. But what alerted me was a BuyHatke monitor when the prices fell down. The prices stayed low for two days and I waited to see if the customer exec would really follow-through, but he didn't.

There was no real loss to me, but it was just an unpleasant experience. I am pretty sure that wouldn't happen if it was a refund/return.

Some CS reps might not actually do whatever is promised, and that's a cause of frustration on top of the customer loosing trust in Amazon, which is not acceptable at all.

You should consider writing to them cis@amazon.in, and if you know the name of customer associate that interacted you with, the better. You could also, alternatively, utilize Amazon's chat-based customer service, as you can actually "keep a record" of things they said and things you said. If what was promised isn't delivered, you can sure make enough noise by directing the query to cis@amazon.in, and/or jeff@ and amit@

That has not been my experience. I think snapdeal rules and yes amazon is better than flipkart (in deliveries).

For anyone wondering why ecommerce is so bad in India, I'll share my experiences from living in the UAE which has a similar tech culture to India (as there are a lot of Indian migrants).

There is one main ecommerce website, but it sells very little (if any) of the products itself - it's more like the marketplace of Amazon for independant sellers. The problem with that is that you really have no idea who you are buying something from, and if it looks too good to be true it probably is (there are lots of scams). Online payments aren't really trusted in the country so you are expected to pay cash on delivery, which if you are lucky will take less than a week.

The weird thing is that there are some decent physical shops, I bought a Dell monitor when I was there for ~€180 and everywhere else I looked (even abroad) had it for €200+. Most things were usually at least 20% more expensive than the EU, which is weird as they have no tax there :-)

I bought a Roomba while I was there from Amazon DE, even including international express delivery and import taxes it was about €150 cheaper than buying it locally.

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