This casual first experience review of the now defunct site www.timtara.com i had written way back in July 2012 on my blog. A lot of water has flown down the river since then. however never too boring to read what we felt back then and it coming true in future. one can sense the impending doom of the site in between the lines! here it goes.
photo credit: www.pardaphash. com
While there is no doubt that e-commerce is here to stay, the current deluge of new websites cropping up almost every day is mind boggling to say the least. Now even the Brick and Mortar companies have jumped into this field, the latest example being www.basicslife.com which goes with a tag line, “Shop like a Man” as if women are not welcome to the website. While it may be a clever marketing tool since as of now most of the online buyers happen to be men as women can’t seem to have satisfaction of shopping without rejecting a minimum 100 samples even if they were to buy the first piece shown! Coming back to the point, the leaders in the E-com field is no doubt the likes of ebay.in, the Indian branch of www.ebay.com, www.flipkart.com promoted by Bansal friends who also happen to be Ex-Amazon employees, www.snapdeal.com, www.shopping.indiatimes.com, www.buytheprice.com amongst others. One more which has been amongst the earliest ones to make foray into this business is www.timtara.com. The website boasts of a Alexa Website Ranking of 14000 which is pretty impressive . Now more about the website itself. First look and it appears like any other similar website with lots of colors, flash files, offers, discount on joining etc. What though strikes you is the use of pink color prominently which is quite brave indeed. Though not sure if its to just give the site a different look or is directed to attract female visitors.
The top of the website claims that the website is ranked number 1 in user experience by Dataquest. When and on what parameters is clearly missing and makes one suspicious immediately. Straight away we headed to one of our favorite critic site for any and everything, www.mouthshut.com and our worst fears came true. The number of complaints on delayed shipping and delivery, poor communication and items not shipped or they being substandard was just overwhelming. This is enough to put anyone off the purchase online forget this particular website to say the least.
Photo credit: www.techinasia.c om
Next we checked out the actual experience of buying an item. This typically starts with a search. We thought of checking out Plantronics Discovery 475 which is the same headset which I guess Salman Khan has used in his movie Bodyguard. But the item was not available! Next we searched Plantronics K100 headphone and that too was not available. Next we tried something simpler. We looked for Samsung HM1700 bluetooth. Even that was not available. Now they do have a category for these items but most of the major models are not available. Not a good going or strategy. The site needs to work a lot in trying to provide adequate variety atleast of important brands such as Samsung, Sennheiser or Plantronics. Hence the first experience was not so memorable really.
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this blog was first published at www.gizmobhai.com on 28 July 2012. Since then the site under review went down under in Mar this year.
regds
Sanchita ( runs www.indiacod.com, e-com site, and ebay selling accounts)
