The other day, I placed an order for some pickles and a couple of other small eatables at an online store.
I don't want to name them because they did follow process and refunded the money for a stockout item.
Zomato and Swiggy have understood the problem and fixed it.
They know that restaurants can run out of the dishes when there's a sudden influx of people ordering the same thing.
Then, there are two options. A refund can be initiated, or the restaurant can call the customer, inform them and ask if they want to replace the dish ordered with another.
Most of the time, the customer will agree.
Back to the order I had placed.
After 5 days, the items were dispatched and simultaneously, a refund initiated for the pickles that were out of stock.
Now, if they had called before dispatching the order and provided an alternative, things would have been fine. I would have commended them on their thoughtfulness.
But this was not acceptable - because of the lack of communication.
The internal system is efficient because the money paid is returned.
However, the lack of communication is a deal breaker.
I'm unlikely to place an order with them again because they've neglected the most important link in the chain.
Keep customers informed when there's a change.
What is your dealbreaker for an online shopping process?
When Facebook's money machine stopped minting
When Facebook went down for six hours, it wasn't users alone who were impacted.
Facebook's outage stopped all scheduled advertising as well.
The calculation, according to AdWeek: Facebook’s ad engine would normally run, on average, $13 million worth of ads per hour or $200,000 per minute, according to figures from its second quarterly earnings. That’s a big hole.
After Facebook came back again, media managers began to notice another thing.
Accelerated delivery of advertising.
More ads were pushed into newsfeeds following the outage and they also noticed that conversions seemed to have dropped.
Now, each of these issues are hard to estimate when there is a continuous spend in place and estimating how it would impact the long term. But for the industry behemoth, disappearing for six hours is a crater - small, but significant.
If advertisers saw lower conversions, they would reduce spends or spread it out over a longer period. No one wants to be at the losing end.
And the objectives are at cross purposes.
Facebook would like to deliver higher conversions, but not at lower costs.
And advertisers want to keep cutting spends.
So, Facebook and advertisers are optimising in opposite directions!
An outage forces clients to hit the Pause button.
Even if the conversion drops momentarily, they hold back and that leads to Facebook losing even more money over time.
For Facebook, this is more worrying than the outage - because it slows down the acceleration of the money machine.
And getting it back to the same levels as before needs more than just a technical fix.
Returned without thanks
Online shopping has given rise to a new kind of behavior.
People returning things has gone through the roof.
It is one thing to walk into a physical showroom, try out anything from dresses or shoes and walk out with what you want.
But online shopping had to allow some version of this in order to succeed. If people had to take the risk of buying things without knowing they could return them, they would probably have held back.
Now, things have moved in the opposite direction.
Few think twice about returning stuff they don't want.
And that's a massive logistics headache.
The systems are built for dispatch to multiple locations from hubs. But this involves getting things back and the same system can't be used. It’s called reverse logistics and the companies involved dread the complexity in handling this.
The returned items can't be sold back through normal channels, since they won't be in the original packaging, or could be damaged or soiled.
Below a certain value, ecommerce companies are deciding it isn't worth it and simply refund the amount so that customers keep buying. Unless they make it a habit, in which case they are blacklisted.
One of the unexpected fallouts of the ecommerce boom. No one could have seen this coming.
Cash on delivery was one of the prime reasons why ecommerce flourished in India in the early stages.
But this is a new problem that has no easy solutions because the returns are random, the path back to the company is not fixed and what needs to be done with the returned goods is also not fixed.
Thanks. But no thanks!
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