The shopping bug bit me with a vengeance this month because I hadn't upgraded my wardrobe in years. So, for someone who does not normally enjoy shopping in malls, I found the online version a lot more convenient. All that variety at my fingertips. So while I have shopped with Inkfruit, Myntra and Flipkart earlier and eBay and Rediff in the very distant past, I decided to try out FashionandYou.
The site has a nice look and feel to it and the stocks get updated quite a bit on a daily basis. So, while I did have a sizing issue with the clothes I bought, they did take it back and give me store credit (since the size I wanted was out of stock). I also picked up a handbag, which is so gorgeous that I'm getting raves about it from everyone.
It's when I decided to also buy a mobile from them, that they majorly slipped up. They were having one of their Express Sales on electronic goods and I liked a burgundy colour HTC Magic phone. It was delivered a lot sooner than my other purchases. It took me a week to unlock it because it was not a phone that was introduced into markets outside of Europe and the US (where it is called T-Mobile). I had to boot the phone and then first sync it with my Google account etc and even then importing my contacts from my SIM card wouldn't happen at all. I tried moving all my contacts from my old phone's memory on to the SIM card, and then tried repeatedly, and nothing was working. I would find contacts from A-F not imported but suddenly starting from G for some reason, and then skipping a lot of names in between to land up at S. Also, manually typing the names wouldn't help either because I kept getting an OS error message.
This problem was annoying. I went online and found out that this was actually an Android bug, so the mobile was defective to begin with. But the really irritating discovery was that the phone had been used and returned - for the very same bug issue! There were calls made and messages sent by the previous buyer still on the phone's log. And to think, I got this phone with neon green stickers all over the box saying 'QC Tested by FashionandYou'.
In a way, I'm glad that they didn't do a thorough job of their QC testing because they might have ended up clearing up the logs, and selling me a second-hand phone. I did suggest to them that they use my seconds site for doing just that because I had set up Seconddealnsteal for that purpose alone. It's offline now. They were not supposed to be doing this though.
Anyway, they refunded my money, so things didn't end badly. But this is a telling lesson about why online buying is riddled with trust issues. An unscrupulous site is not going to bother with niceties like refunding and you could end up losing a lot of your money and be stuck holding on to faulty merchandise that you can't use or resell - in any good conscience - to some other hapless person.
While, the purpose of this post is not to crib about the site but to warn. I still find that they have better stuff than others that I have checked out - like Zovi, Jabong and Brandmile. But to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
The site has a nice look and feel to it and the stocks get updated quite a bit on a daily basis. So, while I did have a sizing issue with the clothes I bought, they did take it back and give me store credit (since the size I wanted was out of stock). I also picked up a handbag, which is so gorgeous that I'm getting raves about it from everyone.
It's when I decided to also buy a mobile from them, that they majorly slipped up. They were having one of their Express Sales on electronic goods and I liked a burgundy colour HTC Magic phone. It was delivered a lot sooner than my other purchases. It took me a week to unlock it because it was not a phone that was introduced into markets outside of Europe and the US (where it is called T-Mobile). I had to boot the phone and then first sync it with my Google account etc and even then importing my contacts from my SIM card wouldn't happen at all. I tried moving all my contacts from my old phone's memory on to the SIM card, and then tried repeatedly, and nothing was working. I would find contacts from A-F not imported but suddenly starting from G for some reason, and then skipping a lot of names in between to land up at S. Also, manually typing the names wouldn't help either because I kept getting an OS error message.This problem was annoying. I went online and found out that this was actually an Android bug, so the mobile was defective to begin with. But the really irritating discovery was that the phone had been used and returned - for the very same bug issue! There were calls made and messages sent by the previous buyer still on the phone's log. And to think, I got this phone with neon green stickers all over the box saying 'QC Tested by FashionandYou'.
In a way, I'm glad that they didn't do a thorough job of their QC testing because they might have ended up clearing up the logs, and selling me a second-hand phone. I did suggest to them that they use my seconds site for doing just that because I had set up Seconddealnsteal for that purpose alone. It's offline now. They were not supposed to be doing this though. Anyway, they refunded my money, so things didn't end badly. But this is a telling lesson about why online buying is riddled with trust issues. An unscrupulous site is not going to bother with niceties like refunding and you could end up losing a lot of your money and be stuck holding on to faulty merchandise that you can't use or resell - in any good conscience - to some other hapless person.
While, the purpose of this post is not to crib about the site but to warn. I still find that they have better stuff than others that I have checked out - like Zovi, Jabong and Brandmile. But to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
