India's Flipkart Has an Amazon Problem

I am confident they will handle it based only on the history I have with them. Killing the golden goose to protect a bunch of thieves makes zero sense.

But companies have made worse mistakes, so who knows.

I don't think that /s is necessary. I think the years have proved that china's trade barrier has worked wonders for home grown businesses. Look at didi chuxing. Blindly aped uber and worth more than them now. On the other hand look at India's own uber competitor: ola. They're struggling almost as much as flipkart while uber thunders ahead.

I've used both Flipkart and Amazon(India) sites.

1. For me, Flipkart's introduction was only due to the huge discounted prices. Also it was new, better and trusted experience compared to Ebay(India). And Amazon came late in the game. Mentally I associate Flipkart with huge Discounts (and Mi phones). And those discounts don't exist any more.

2. Amazon.in is just a great user experience. Flipkart.com still feels like a site with ads (but those aren't ads :). In its first few months - Amazon.in was terribly slow - but now thats never a problem. Now Amazon is easier to surf and look at and the rates are almost similar

3. Flipkart has a trust problem with many users and its just harder to fix that. On one account they had no-idea where the item was. After a lot of delay(about a week) - they sent me the same item twice and they didn't realize it. After a week I wrote back to them to collect the duplicate item and I got the response below:

"This is due to the fact that most our courier partners are tied up with us for deliveries alone and some of the locations are currently not serviceable by our pick-up partners.

Once the product is reaches us, I assure you that the courier charges you incur will be reimbursed to your Flipkart Wallet and you’ll receive an automated e-mail as soon as your wallet is credited. This has unlimited validity.

Kindly pack the product in the brand box if any with the MRP tag and send it to the below mentioned address with the return ID labeled on it. Also, please mention your address. "

Why would I hustle to courier them back? And "no pickup partners in that area" was a plain lie. I just try to avoid Flipkart after that incident and prefer buying from Amazon even if it is slightly costlier.

4. And when they went "Mobile-only"... I was like - I DO NOT WANT THAT APP (They reversed that BAD decision pretty soon)

> People in India are surely learning the same thing.

Flipkart from circa 2012 had that. The story should probably more about how they lost that trust.

I used to order things on Flipkart regularly (during my WFH years in Bangalore) because the couriers were employed by them, had multiple delivery attempts in a day and items in general came in a day or two to my doorstep.

At that point, it was as if they treated "shipping" as their primary product rather than the box they were delivering.

For my vantage point, the whole process starts to unravel with "WS Retail" and Flipkart's schism.

Suddenly, it looked there was a split-brain between buying, shipping and delivering.

I have not bought anything from Flipkart since more than one year. The company was doomed from the start, I had the chance to see it form their interview process. It is so broken that I felt it outrageous that it was the _hottest_ startup in India.

Amazon is awesome, because it provides low prices + quality service. It isn't just "discount retailing"

Flipkart built its reputation on motorola phones because Moto was exclusive on Flipkart, beyond that they never really picked up, the thing is Flipkart's quality reduced time over time and their approach itself was wrong, they started on "discounts" when they should have started on maintaining their customer service.

But typical Indian business, once they "grow" they don't care about customers anymore, the only puzzling thing is that how does Flipkart act like it from now itself, by no definition are they grown or successful or both.