Flipkart.com Review and Why it is The Best Shopping Site in India

Flipkart, the company which started in 2007 and now has emerged as the top place to shop online in India. I am writing this review with utmost conviction and as a regular customer of Flipkart.

I have bought many items from them and they have all been delivered in proper shape and normally before the stipulated delivery time. Even the laptop which I'm using to write this has been bought from Flipkart.

Flipkart's main business is to sell books. It started as a book shopping site, but now has items such as mobiles, Television sets, microwaves, computers and laptops, even pens and diaries. As to test the site I first bought a book (novel) on cash on delivery option and the shipping too was free; I was amazed to get the book in flat two days at my doorstep.

Firstly they use to gave free shipping on a purchase of more than Rs. 100, but now they have raised that amount to Rs. 200. For example, if you want to buy something of less than 200, say the item cost is 140 then you'll have to add an extra Rs. 30 as shipping charges. So in order to get around that what you can do is to add one item such as a movie or something else to make the amount to Rs. 200. By doing that you'll save the shipping charges and also have another item.

Now I don't have to brag anything about their customer service and their after sales support. I have had some great experience with their customer service.

Let me justify this by giving an example, I recently bought a computer mouse because the older one which I had, had problems with the right click button. So I bought a cheaper one at about 160 rupees from Flipkart. It was delivered after two days, but after sometime it started showing some problems. So I called up the customer care and they advised me that the item will be replaced. They give 30 replacement guarantee, and mine was in the bracket of 30 days. In the meantime, I re-installed my operating system (OS) and the mouse started working fine. So the problem was in my OS and not in the mouse. Now there was no need to repack it and get it replaced. What happened after some days, probably three days after, I received an email from their customer service department that I should check the mouse settings etc. for any system glitches. But I had already done that and everything was good now. So my reply was that the mouse is working fine and thanked them for there proactive approach.

You can see the concern from the customer service department. Below is the exact emails that were exchanged between me and the customer service department.

Dear Kannan,

Greetings from Flipkart!

Order ID:OD10803100502

We sincerely apologize for the delay.

We request you to change the mouse settings and check whether scroll is working. Kindly write us back if still mouse is not working.

Please feel free to write back or call us at 080-43526600 for any further clarifications.

Warm regards,

Nisha Patil

Flipkart Customer Support

www.flipkart.com
The store at your door

"Statistics are like miniskirts. What they reveal is tantalizing, but what they hide is crucial." - Navjot Singh Sidhu

The above quote on statistics from Sidhu does not apply over here. Statistics do matter in this case. Flipkart has grown rapidly from all sides; be it orders, website traffic, company size and its own delivery network.

Independent web-ranking company Alexa, a company which ranks websites based on its traffic ranks it at 31^th place in India. Whereas competitors such as Ebay.in is at the 40th and Infibeam.com at the 197th place when it comes to online traffic. Online traffic is crucial because the whole concept of online shopping depends on traffic. More the traffic, more will be sales.

Ebay comes close-second and has a remarkable presence in India but the concept at both the websites are starkly different. At Ebay.in there are thousands of individual sellers and Flipkart operates by its own as single large entity. Ebay gives its sellers to set their price what they want because of that you may see the same item priced differently from different sellers. At Flipkart there will be one and only one price for a specific product. Flipkart sources its orders in bulk from suppliers whereas at Ebay there are small sellers who don't have the capability to get orders in bulk. So the acquiring cost of Flipkart gets less and the cost of selling get less, thus they are able to pass on that to the buyers which reflects on the product price. More on price comparison in the last section.

Now to throw some light on the sales for each day. Flipkart says it is more than 30000 per day, that makes at least 1250 per hour, and a whopping 20 per minute.

So many people are shopping from Flipkart and they are not crazy or want to lose money. They are happy from the service and are returning to shop once again.

I also have one another hub discussing about the top ten shopping sites in India which gets good number of readers every month, in that I have a poll wherein readers can vote for the best among the list, and so far more than 58 percent of people have voted for Flipkart.com whereas obviously the rest nine collectively don't have that figures. Below is the screen shot of that poll.

We all want to buy products at economical and cheaper prices. Every one wants to save as much money as they can. I did a quick comparison on some of the products and found the below results.

Prices compared on four leading ecommerce sites. Data as of 12/01/2012. I have selected five products from different categories on Flipkart and searched them on other shopping websites. Bold data indicates lowest price.

Let me be the first to admit that the prices vary from product to product. There can be situations where a product may be priced high on Flipkart and low on some other websites. In my experience I have always found product priced low on Flipkart when compared to others.

Flipkart is still evolving as a shopping site and not all categories of items are available on it. They don't have every item (such as clothes, watches etc.) that can already be purchased at some other sites which is weak about them considering there exponential growth.

Some other common features that Flipkart offers is of 30-day replacement guarantee, EMI facility on select credit cards like HDFC, Citibank, ICICI. When paying as an EMI facility you can get the installments to be converted to 3 or 6 months. If you avail EMI for three months there is no additional charge whereas for six months they charge and additional Rs. 500. EMI can only be availed if you shop for more than Rs. 4000 at a time.

All things considered and I still have a positive outlook for Flipkart. Do you agree or disagree?

Below is a poll for gathering you opinion about Flipkart. I hope you found this review useful.