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.

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. 

It’s no new thing for a publication on the Internet to lift content from another source and fail to attribute it. Happens all the time. Many large media houses in the US would take a story from you and credit you by name on their online site, but won’t link. That is still acceptable, but when you pitch yourself as THE Economic Times and pull writers on your platform, you better maintain high standards!

This is just probably just one of many cases where a top publication (or a sister concern of a top publication) failed to maintain the most basic work ethic on the Internet. Seeing the standard of tech journalism I have seen in India (add to that some internal bits that I keep hearing), I am worried that there are very few like Nixxin doing a good job. We need a few more Medianamas in India.

Disclaimer: I should point here that I am the Editor & Publisher of Onlygizmos. Thus Technoholik is a competitor. But I write this post as just another reader who refuses to accept lack of integrity from a publication that he ends up reading.

Update: Seems like Technoholik has taken note of the issue and added the sources as AndroidOS and Pocketnow.

]]> http://annkur.com/2011/09/dear-technoholik-where-is-the-link/feed/ 3 http://annkur.com/2011/08/lesson-in-customer-relationships/ http://annkur.com/2011/08/lesson-in-customer-relationships/#comments Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:12:01 +0000 Annkur http://annkur.com/?p=975

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. Tanmay tweeted about issues he was having with Hostgator and I jumped to defend Hostgator. Hostgator has been nothing less than fantastic for me and a lot of my small sites including this one is hosted with them. For a long time even Onlygizmos was hosted with Hostgator and we NEVER had any issues. Shared hosting services are known to give poor performance / oversell under the ‘unlimited’ tag, but yet HG found me defending them.

Now, as things turn out to be, in both these cases I was wrong. HDFC acknowledged to Ashutosh a little later that they indeed need a photo ID from him and Tanmay informed me that Hostgator has acknowledged the problem to him. My reply to both of them was within seconds of their tweet going public, way faster than any PR mechanism or online reputation management system would kick-in for them on Twitter.

What does this tell us?

As a service provider / business, your best customer service agents are your existing customers. The best publicity you can get is from word of mouth and who better then your own users to do that? You may not be able to deliver a 100% all the time, but if you have good karma, it will come back!

Note: humorwa hai, dil pe mat lena!

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?

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

If you are unable to see the video – Go Here

and more….

1. The Red Dot immediately makes you unapprochable. Though some would know that its JLT, you might loose out on many a conversations… Can hurt work, if you use Gtalk extensively to communicate with clients and business associates.

2. You appear way down in the list … below the green dots

3. Red makes you look angry

5. People dont care anyways, they will still bug you

ALso See: Alternatives to being Busy – IDLE/Invisible