A little known fact about working online in India is that for non-ecommerce online business owners, a person without an MBA, MCA or Computer Science degree or young enough will find it extremely difficult to get any kind of support. In fact, when this individual shops online, many substandard products will be dumped on the person in an attempt to waste money and manufacturers support will be encouraged to avoid giving after sales service. This problem is most acute for electronics products like netbooks/laptops/tablets and mobiles.
A netbook(Toshiba make) purchased online from F** had a power supply button which was not functioning properly. The keyboard started malfunctioning after 2 months , and even though the netbook was under warranty, it took more than 1 month for the netbook to be repaired. Similarly, a Blackberry playbook costing more than 12k is not functional, despite repeated follow-up with the service centre. The seller does not provide any proper customer support in this case also. Repeated phone calls and emails to the support centre are a waste of time, as customer support is not interested in solving the buyers problem. Additionally, the buyer may also be subjected to identity theft by ruthless criminal gangs, who will try to frame the online buyer in order to get credit for the online purchase. Many buyers buy online to save time, but the poor quality and lack of customer support results in wastage of time.
In such cases, though it may be a little more expensive, some buyers will revert to buying offline . If a laptop is purchased from a store, the buyer can get customer support, since it is difficult to behave badly in public. If it starts malfunctioning, the customer can take it to the store, where sales will usually help since they do not want to drive away other customers in the store. Some Online sellers should learn to treat customers professionally and not misuse the online purchases as a means to settle personal scores/prejudices.