In the past month I shopped from 4 different online stores various electronics. After a while I decided to post my experiences about them in a greek froogle like “forum” / price search engine named skroutz (totally misspelled, pronounced in Greek “scrooge” with the exact same meaning).
The skroutz system
First of all the classification and the evaluation done by skroutz is peculiar. The are in the eshop business and probably they are protecting their customers, in the sense, that they have to verify whether one is a legit customer of a shop or not (the actual verification is. I am not sure how well this work (I am pretty sure that things might turn bad) but so far in my experience no censorship has happened in order for a shop (their customer) to be protected.
How to evaluate the presales “engineering”?
This is a tough one. There are some obvious metrics (ie no damaged goods, no used goods, solid handling, and timeframe keeping). I have all those years huge amounts of experience on all fields (torn books from amazon due to incorrect handling, etc) but all in all I don’t have to say much about my critique on these shops. Some where delayed more than they should, but all arrived in excellent condition.
The Rant
For the only shop (I won’t name it of course) that I had bad experiences is the one that went off the time frame, they indicated in their site. I didn’t mind waiting a few days more (I waited ~15 business days) or less, the items I ordered were not high priority. What irritated me the most was the fact that every now and then those people were calling me in my cellular phone, to state the fuckin’ obvious: “Your shipment is going to be delayed, we are really really really sorry… blablabla“. Why didn’t they sent me an(some) email(s) instead? Why did they wasted precious communication resources instead of sending me an email? Why did they waste my time (they were calling business hours) in meaningless conversations?
Some times I wonder what kind of business policy is that. I really do adore the shops that are quiet and call only in ultra emergencies (ie a Greek online book store once called me to tell me that the book I ordered is going to be reprinted with some updated info and whether I would like to order that instead the one I had ordered. - I REALLY APPRECIATED THAT CALL! I Love protoporia.gr)
Final thoughts
It is not good customer relationships to call me every second day. Good customer relationships are to have the goods in time and in order. please keep that in mind. The best virus -they say- is the one that gets the job done, while you have never heard of. IMHO this quote applies almost everywhere.
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