Ecommerce in Middle East is gradually taking off and there are many new entrants in an arena that used to be dominated by souq.com only. However most of them miss the singular factor that online shoppers look for most – customer service .
I have had the experience of shopping with a few major online retailers – with big names but surprisingly enough other than JadoPado, nobody seems to understand the importance of timely shipment, communication and customer service.
Jadopado.com really surprised me. I bought twice from them, in one instance they shipped the next day, in another they estimated next day shipping but shipped the same day they got order ! How do they do it ? They claim that they sell only what they stock. Offcourse it means that they have to have some capital held up in stocks, but that’s the only way you can succeed in online business.
I can’t take the name of other big retailers , it would simply spoil their business, but look at this particular store for example – I placed an order on 30th. Today is 7th and still there is no indication when it would be shipped. Agreed there were 3 days EID holidays inbetween but that still leaves us with 4 working days. They need these many days to ship ?? And to top it, they never communicated to me that it would take that long. My card has been swiped already and here I am waiting for the merchandise to arrive. customer service says they will “try to ship in 2-3 days”.
What’s happening with such etailers is that they don’t have the goods with them. They buy as they get orders. It means that they have absolutely no control over the inventories – their supplier may run out of stocks, or may increase the price or may simply not be available on a saturday afternoon to execute their order. This is bad, if you don’t want to invest in stocks , at least invest in logistics so you can have a “just in time” inventory just when you need.
And if you don’t, your clients are going to go to other etailers , thankfully there are a few good ones out there. And soon the market is going to weed out all those who can’t offer a customer service that the clients expect.
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