Flipkart’s refund games

Before you go on reading the post, I’d like to state openly, I am not a very big flipkart fan. Infact not even a fan at all. It’s rocket high valuations, its crazy ideas of burning cash and the founders blatant approach towards human resource has always agitated me. Well, in the 6-7 years of flipkarts existence, all that I’ve ever bought is a book, 1 pendrive and now this Moto G.

This is about the fake refunding games flipkart played with me and a dent on the highly appreciated customer satisfaction ratings it has.

I’d ordered a Moto G from Flipkart which was delivered in time.

The phone delivered perfect satisfaction. But, the charger gave up on its life within a week. It simply stopped functioning.

I immediately lodged in a complaint :

As assured in the mail, I got a call in 2 days and the customer care executive understood my problem and offered to refund Rs. 500 in my flipkart account wallet and directed me to buy a new charger from the site. I asked them to simply replace my charger with a new one. I didn’t want to get into the hassles of buying a “charger” online. The polite executive stated, “this is all we can do”, replacing a charger would take 8 days and buying online would render me with a charger within 2 days.

I had no choice and decided to give in to their call!

The moment i got this mail, I noticed the catch, the cash could only be used to make a purchase from WS Retail. Nevermind, I waited for the cash to arrive in my wallet. And, when it did, I was amazed to see that from the entire range of chargers on display at Flipkart, WS Retail sold none.

I was caught between flipkart’s fooling game of customer satisfaction.

Once again, I lodged in a complain through e-mail :

The resolute to this query was a sorry and this link to buy a compatible adapter for Moto G being sold by WS Retail :

https://www.flipkart.com/digiflip-mc002-mobile-wall-charger/p/itmdmfgcef5tfxhc?pid=ACCDJKHFHHBMF6DE

The link has been showing as discontinued since the time I had received this mail.

I gave up on lodging repetitive complaints at Flipkart. Have bought a charger that cost me Rs.800 and donated books worth Rs. 500 (the wallet money) from flipkart to my sisters campaign at Teach for India.

Lesson Learnt:  Never trust an ecomm player, You can go to your nearest mobile shop in case such things happen and demand a replacement but in this case, I would have to go bangalore!