 ILLUSTRATION BY ANIRBAN BORA CONSUMER PROTECTION Cart Full Of Woes If you think online shopping is safe, think again. Here are the few checks you should make The Right Click
*** In this age of chatting, tweeting and blogging, the millennials are used to doing a lot of thingsfrom the comfort of home. Online shopping is one of those luxuries, which easily catches an Internet user’s fancy. However, if you think all that you have to do are log in to an online shopping site, choose an item and place the order so that the product is yours, think again. If you ask Arpan Kumar Jain of Bangalore, he will say something else. For Jain, this otherwise smooth experience turned sour when he purchased a six-litre Polar geyser in November 2008 from a popular online shopping portal. It was a gift to his mother. He paid Rs 3,000 for it, and the product was supposed to be covered by a two-year warranty. However, when the geyser was delivered at Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, where his mother lives, it was damaged and the three-pin plug attached to it was broken. In January 2009 he contacted the e-shopping company as the geyser was leaking and was not functioning. The customer care department of the portal said that they would forward the complaint to the parent company, which is Polar, and inform him. When he did not receive any response till July he called the online retailer once again and asked them to replace the faulty geyser as it was within the warranty period. To his surprise, he was informed by the company that it can’t take the responsibility as it had stopped selling the same product through its portal service. Being highly disappointed, Jain finally got the geyser fixed from a local service centre at his own cost. The obvious question, then, is what should you do if you get cheated. Arun Saxena, president, International Consumer Rights Protection Council, (ICRPC), an NGO providing guidance to consumers, says, “One can approach consumer courts with such complaints. Expenses in these courts are pretty low. Consumers can also appeal to the civil and the criminal court depending on the offence.” Saxena further adds that, “the buyer can get in touch with the cyber cell of the police and complain to the inspector of police of the locality where the website is hosted, asking them to remove the portal for cheating customers.” The worst part of the story is that once the product is sold, nobody is bothered if the product has reached the customer safely. Jain says, “If educated people like us get cheated, what will happen to them who are not aware of their rights?” If this continues to happen with many other customers who avail the online route to shopping quite frequently, then very soon buyers will develop a dislike for online shopping. They will prefer to stick to the traditional way. That will hurt the prospect of e-commerce, which is in a nascent stage in a country like India. There are certain things which the online retailers just cannot overlook. If a customer wants a product to be delivered on a specific date, then failure of delivery on the right time makes the purchase almost useless. While ordering fresh flowers or cakes, place your order with a reputed website to avoid embarrassment on late delivery. Also, avoid shopping cosmetic products and perfumes from an online portal service because you cannot check their date of expiry until they have been delivered, and you have made the full payment. |
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