This morning I wake up with yet another ecommerce launch and this is the much hyped entry of Amazon in India. People may like, hate or justify the current model that Junglee (Amazon) has adopted and we can all speculate on what would the future be. But as a consumer, a retailer and a user of these same ecommerce sites since over 10 years, I am saddened to see that Amazon makes a mistake that the Indian ecommerce scene has long forgotten.

The very first mobile listed on Junglee.com, a Samsung Galaxy SII is priced at Rs 28,400 on the homepage. A quote lower than what Pricebaba shows for Mumbai and given that most reputed sites are listing the SII for over Rs 30,000, this is a fantastic offer. But wait, click on the thumbnail, and then click again on the seller information page of the lowest bidder and you shall see this

… and if you clicked Visit Seller Store instead, you will notice this only on the checkout page of a site that is at best, Web 1.0.

Charging shipping extra is fine. Charging extra for credit card transaction is ok. But after several clicks quoting me Rs 1998 as Tax is not. Lucrative advertising with hidden charges is a practice most e-retail players gave up sometime back. Amazon has work in hand to curate the experience I get on Junglee. The ‘we are a platform’ wordings hasn’t worked for eBay as an excuse to compete with the ones who are really delivering a good experience, there is no reason Junglee would be an exception!

Welcome Junglee, You Have Work To Do! 

Disclaimer: Pricebaba is my venture.

A few weeks back I received an email from TheViewsPaper inviting me to be a panelist for a Tweet-a-thon (hashtagged #IFeelup). The formatting of the email and less than 5 secs of reading was enough to tell me that this isn’t for me. It was at best a mass emailer sent to hundreds of people and I was clear that I wouldn’t get involved.

For me, there might be plenty of fundamental reasons for not getting involved, but probably my friends on twitter put it right – a name that I haven’t heard about invites me, I am wary by default (honestly I have probably heard the name Theviewspaper once before). But fast forward a few days after the tweet-a-thon is over, I see hate is in the air. The same folks probably who went about trending #ifeelup are offended. The Tweet-a-thon was a 7up promotion.

The best part: the first email inviting to be a participant didn’t mention 7UP, the second one which was unread till date mentioned 7UP. But people actually fell for this? Trended the hashtag and now crying foul? Are the ones who suffered the overdose of 6600 tweets really bothered? For the real consumers, this is probably just another disturbance in their timeline. Markeeters fighting Markeeters!

Today morning while I was searching for some news on the Samsung Nexus Prime, I came across over a dozen sites who have covered the news of Nexus Primes UAprof being leaked on Samsungmobile’s website. One of the results on the first page was from an Indian site and I clicked through. As I read through this article on Technoholik, I notice something weird. They haven’t given any credit to either PocketNow or elsewhere for this story. PocketNow being the one who broke the story originally.

And that’s not all. One may argue (would be stupid though) that the link on Samsung Mobile was publicly accessible and thus demands no source credit, but what acts as a final nail on the coffin if the fact that the image used for the story  on Technoholik is stolen from AndroidOS. As I tweeted about Technoholik failing to cite a source for a story they broke, Gaurav of AndroidOS.in noted that the image in use belongs to him. See it for yourself – AndroidOS vs Technoholik.  Read the rest of this entry »

On a day when I find myself defending two companies who have me as a client since years, I find it so obvious to share this simple lesson on customer service. In any industry it isn’t possible to give 100% satisfaction, something ought to go wrong sometime, somewhere. Specially if you are a bank or a hosting service dealing with large no of users. So I find these two gentlemen one after the other, complaining about their experience with HDFC and Hostgator respectively.

Both HDFC and Hostgator are service providers whom I have been very satisfied with (In fact this site is hosted on Hostgator since inception).  When I saw the first tweet from Ashutosh about HDFC asking for a photo identity for a simple work, I replied and defended HDFC. My defense was partly from my experience and largely in good faith. HDFC has been good to me, not perfect, but generally very good. And I jumped to defend them. Pause.

Take 2. Read the rest of this entry »

Google has launched its Facebook rival or lets say its most ambitious launch in the social space. Google+ has a lot of Google in it and it also has a lot of Facebook in it. With the mixed bag of early reviews, fight for invites, hacks and debate on G+’s prospects, here is a conversation I had on Facebook (with Himanshu Bizdharma-wala), about Google Plus vs Facebook!

Note: humorwa hai, dil pe mat lena!

Dear Google,

For years you have denied that your SPAM fighting skills are poor and it is messed up in favor of cheap internet marketers. And your latest war on SPAM / Content Farm etc is a bold move (though does prove that you were seeing a lot of mess) but it isn’t working. As much as I would have loved to see this working, I feel you have messed it up badly.

Can you tell me, when you have us (OnlyGizmos) on Google News and any thing we post is indexed in seconds, how the hell do these sites who copy our content rank over us? That too when I am searching for exactly the same title as my blog post! Hours of hard work and 3 people co-ordination to get that review live before anyone else on the web and what, they spammers get the first rank in organic results?

To all my friends who keep wondering what is Social Media,

And also to all my friends who are Social Media fans… An amazing video!

If you are unable to see the video – Go Here

… Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some silly and some not so silly reasons for not keeping that RED DOT always against your name on Gtalk…

Read the rest of this entry »