Customer Orders iPod, Flipkart Delivers Two Stones Instead

This is crazy! A Twitter user, who shopped on Flipkart, tweeted today that his sister ordered for an iPod on Flipkart and got a couple of stones instead.

Flipkart has promptly followed up with this and has assured a replacement.

Now, here is where my worries start. I don’t know what is the exact case but I have a feeling folks at Flipkart will never ship stones from their warehouse. Next, comes courier delivery guys. In case of Flipkart, this also is taken care of Flipkart but then you never know.

The reason I am worried is that there are so many smaller ecommerce startups and if such cases are fabricated (I am not talking about this particular case) then smaller startups will have a real tough time.

In legal terms, Flipkart can’t really do anything right now. Why? Because they cannot legally assure that the right item was actually delivered to the customer. Yes, the item must have been shipped out from the warehouse and details entered, but whether the same item reached the customer cannot be confirmed.

I feel what e-commerce companies can now do is maybe ask the customer to open the package in front of them and then maybe click a photo or sign a document. Maybe companies can also keep RFID tags on the product inside so that they can track the shipment better.

Anyways, in this particular case, Flipkart has assured a replacement. We’ll see what happens next.

What do you think about this?