I am Chetan and founder of a publishing house called Half Baked Beans.
We sell books through Flipkart as a seller and the following is an account of what has been happening for the past two months with the sellers.
Even though Flipkart is one of the leading online business companies in the country, it’s only NOW that they have resorted to become exploitative towards small scale sellers with each passing day!
Little did we know that listing in Flipkart could have been such a boon turned bane in our businesses! Neither are they interested in giving apt and timely responses for the enquiries and complaints made by the sellers nor in returning the parcels or giving the claim for the sellers.
Examples of Incidents :-
Few of the disappointing incidents faced by the sellers are abominable. Here’s a list (Feel free to add your’s)
Due to system errors there are “NO pick ups!” You can keep following up but the screen will just go ticking by a digit to increase the PICK UP RE-ATTEMPTS # with each passing day.
An incident to share, we had already dispatched a book and it kept showing in the dispatch seller panel until three days later. Not only did business suffer, customer satisfaction went out of the window and we were unfairly charged with CANCELLATION CHARGES and PRODUCT LISTING DEACTIVATION.
Many orders have been cancelled and many listing have been deactivated because of the technical error (as we learnt from other sellers) and even when all issues are happening in real, Flipkart hasn’t called the sellers for any discussion.
Unanswered questions:-
Who will pay commission which Flipkart charged due to seller cancellation?
Who will pay the loss which we bear due to deactivation of listings?
Who pays for the undelivered goods which have mysteriously been untraceable like the Malaysian Airlines?
Who pays for the returns when Flipkart conveniently sends mails stating: “The order has not been delivered either due to customer cancellation or logistics partner”
The Answer my friend is blowing in the wind, and the answer is we, the Sellers!
Flipkart doesn’t share numbers of the customers. Do we even get to rectify if it’s Flipkart or the customers who cancel the orders due to delay in their own Logistics chain? The accounts (or the money transferred to a seller’s account after a product sale) are broken into so many modules that reach to our account on different dates that it is practically impossible for even the executives to come up with the revenues for one particular order!
These are only a few questions unanswered. The customer support executives know all details (technical or whatever) of all active listings on Flipkart and they immediately create a new order (This re-order is showed in seller panel like new order, there is no mark for re-order) . Without understanding the technical issue, they refund the amount even from the buyer’s remorse issues or buyer not interested, sometimes they initiate returns up to three times for a Rs.250 item. (Where they charge 6 times of courier charge from sellers)
Here is an excerpt of a chain mail which we sellers were a part of and one seller shared his experience-
“Still After 4 days, status has not been updated in the Portal. We will now bear the loss of product and product will also be blocked, will have to also bear seller cancellation charges.
This is happening so frequently in last weeks, have already incurred loss of previous products. So, now we are stopping the listing for high price products and will remain unlisted.
I think we should lodge an FIR against E-Kart so that some legal action can be taken for STOLEN products.
The main problem is the products got picked up by E-Kart, they signed manifest copy. But those products never got returned . If you open a case with Seller Support they share the status given by the logistics that “You have not handed over the product” even though you provided the signed manifest copy, they simply ignore those copies and stay on their word that you have not handed over the product. I have one email communication where they said manifest is not the proof of product handover.
Later on we went to Lawrence Road MP Hub but we didn’t find any single product out of 5 products which we handed over to E-Kart they started the blame game but nothing has happened till today.
So where are the products which we handed over? Obviously they were stolen hence not uploaded to the portal. That is why we didn’t find any when we went to Lawrence Road MP many times.
We have even created SPF claim for the same but till now no update on the same even though they have 12 days SLA.
It is not the one and only incident but it keeps occurring.”
Suggestions Welcome:-
As a conclusion, if things are going in the same way as they are, the existence of this website after 1 or 1.5 years from now remains questionable. Maybe many of you remember Letsbuy, Tradus, Buytheprice and what fate did these websites meet?
So the company should take into consideration of sellers needs and they should discuss the issues with the sellers and they should enter between seller and buyer only when there is any dispute which seller wasn’t able sort out with the buyer. If these things happen it will be good for the sellers. And also should call a meeting with the sellers and thereby they can come into some fruitful solution which will be beneficial for both sides.
P.S.
The above situation has been faced by us and many other sellers, you might have a different experience. I want to ask if there is anything we can do or anything you have done previously in this kind of situation?
Thanks
Chetan Soni
https://twitter.com/chetansoni23
https://www.facebook.com/Half8akedBeans
asha chaudhry
hi chetan,
it’s sad to hear sellers are facing so many issues with the top marketplaces.
do read these two posts:
https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/ecommerce-do-you-know-the-seller-s-story
https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/ecommerce-marketplaces-a-curse-or-an-opportunity
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
I dunno anything about how to solve your problems, but i do like
‘Abominable’ & ‘Blowing in the wind’
Good luck – I will promote this
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
But why are you still selling on this website?
Raj Waghray
Flipkart’ seller portal and the seller experience needs a ground up overhaul. Have you explored – Fulfillment by Amazon?
Chetan Soni
Hi Raj,
We have explored that and are selling on Amazon as of now but FBA has another issues as the books need to be send to Haryana each time.
Chetan Soni
Alok Sir, thanks for support.
We are still selling on this website because the top 2 sites for buying books are Amazon and Flipkart and they do give us orders because the customers trust them but they do not know what sellers are going through .
Arpita Khadria
I think the Flipkart on boarding and seller support system is something that I have had a problem with from the start. We sell our Signtist Books and T-shirts there, and it took the team almost 2 months to on board us. Another problem that we faced was that of attrition and churn of staff within Flipkart. Whoever was handling our account would not stay for more than 2 weeks, so the cycle would begin all over again! It was certainly not a pleasant experience.
Speaking of losses… they had promised me that they will buy 400 books of each SKU (we had 5 in all) and store it in their warehouse, because they believed in the product. They also signed an agreement for SOR. So I printed minimum 500 copies of each book. One day before they were supposed to pick up the stocks they backed out saying their policies have changed! And that they can no longer buy stock outright. However, they connected me to a book distributor who at least agreed to store the stock, not buy them. So who took that loss?? Me… even though I had a signed agreement from them!
But at least they promoted my books on their site for a month. So the marketing team really tried to make up for my losses. The ops team on the other hand did not even reply to my mails.
Chetan Soni
Hi Arpita,
It’s high time that the sellers on these sites unite and stand up and do something.
Devesh Tanna
Flipkart is growing too fast and they don’t have systems in place.
They are increasing sellers fees and giving sellers zero support in exchange.
We sell low value products online. The recent change in Flipkart Pricing (applicable July 3rd) makes it impossible to sell them any longer on Flipkart.
The problem with Flipkart as with most is they have created a call center with the fancy name – Seller Support which does everything but supports sellers.
Every seller on boarded should have a dedicated account manager. If you cannot allocate a dedicated manager, it would be better not to on board merchants. If you can afford to loose 10,000 crores in a year on discounts, marketing etc. About 300 account managers (1 manager handles 100 accounts) at 5 lakh a year is only 15 crores a year is a small cost.
Today sellers have to contact a different team for listing, a different team for account, a different team for FA, a different team for Deactivated listings, a different team for logistics issues. If a sellers is associated with 5 – 10 portals, he would go crazy just keeping up with all these sites.
Another huge issue is that their payments and accounting is a nightmare. They pay you based on some weird matrices and they do not give you one consolidated (periodical) statement. Say this is the no of items shipped, and they have either been returned on these dates with (pod attached) and these is the balance payment. You have to go through multiple payment statements just to trace out your payments.
E-kart logistics is worst among st all pick up guys. They will just count number of parcels, not check against order ids while picking up. Amazon guys scan each order on pick up, so your orders are updated on real time basis. For flipkart you need to wait till evening to get a pick up confirmation or wait till next morning when boy comes again.
I do not know where the 1.6 billion $ has gone. Definitely not in systems.
Devesh Tanna