What goes around, comes around

Have you ever wondered that when you need some information from any company’s customer service, be it their phone based or website based; things are never to be found when YOU NEED it! If you call their numbers, their servers will be down; or just THAT ONE SYSTEM where your information will be out of service right now If you check their website, you keep clicking on links and there are tons of advertisements and offers to be seen, but not that simple piece of information which you need. I have both prepaid mobile and broadband/landline from Airtel.  So todayRead More…

Every problem doesn’t need one to go to consumer court, but I won’t stop anyone if they want to Having received many questions on a popular post on how to file a consumer court complaint (in Bangalore), I have decided to give some alternative and easier steps to take before thinking of filing a consumer court complaint. If I see the maximum number of problems based on comments and emails received, they fall into these categories: 1. Defects found in newly purchased mobile phones.  I suggest to follow up with manufacturer directly as part of warranty, unless this is somethingRead More…

After my successful review of Pepperfry because they took action based on that, here is another one on my recent Infibeam experience.  To be fair, I have purchased earlier from them unlike Pepperfry where it was my first order. On 10 January, I had ordered a book on Infibeam.  The book was unavailable on other sites like Flipkart etc. and after doing search on Infibeam site, it seemed used books were available through foreign sellers.  It seems Infibeam had tie up with foreign sellers who will ship it to Infibeam and then it will be shipped to me.  But IRead More…

I wish I had read some reviews of Pepperfry before placing my order – first and last order I guess – there.  It seems there are plethora of bad reviews about them on many websites.  Just click on this google search for pepperfry review and you will see what I mean. As I had mentioned in an earlier post about my experience with Pepperfry where they delivered 2 broken items and 1 wrong item for the same order; they were not responding to my refund request made on 13th Nov and I had to remind them by email about it. Read More…

E-Commerce is a thriving business in India and there are many online vendors doing business like eBay, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Infibeam, Jabong etc. I have been buying things from eBay India from 2003 onwards since the time it was known by the previous name Baazi.com before being acquired by eBay. There are other websites which are run like marketplaces like OLX and Quikr but my focus will be on E-Commerce vendors those like Flipkart and Snapdeal which sell their own stuff.

Amidst all the competition among online sellers to get attention of customers, a commonly used theme on many websites is to promise a 7 day or 30 day replacement warranty or returns policy etc. One must read the fine print in these terms before making a purchase because:

After posting a few days back about procedure of filing a complaint in Bangalore consumer court/forum, I checked to see how it fares in google search. It has reached no 11 (top of page 2) for keywords "consumer court complaint bangalore" so it is not doing so bad. It could also mean there is hardly any resources available or there is general lack of interest among consumers about exercising their rights so my post may be just one more in the list of very few documents available. Anyway, my intention is not to become some kind of consumer activist. I also hate the term RTI activist which seems to equate them with that rare category of freedom revolutionaries rather than making RTI to be used by any citizen.

Without further ado, here goes the template for filing a consumer forum complaint in Bangalore. You can modify it to suit any other city’s district consumer forum too.

Tata Fry (err Tata Sky) has been in playing shenanigans mode since September mid when suddenly my TV stopped working. Ultimately it was found to be a problem in a connection box outside the home but they took more than 10 days to fix it and all the while kept charging even though I was opening a complaint every day, because they were closing the complaint every day without doing anything!