Indian shopping sites - Need to improve a lot!
I wanted to buy this shaver, but Amazon said it wouldnt be possible to ship this to India, due to some export regulation blah blah blah. So, I decided to check the local online malls. I am not new to online shopping in India, but It has been a long time since I visited them, especially Fabmall (now renamed to indiaplaza.in).
The site took sometime to load, but the thing that got my attention was - The interface hasn’t changed at all.  I guess the store name is the only thing that has changed (kinda like selling the same shampoo in a new bottle with the tag “New formula”). The site looked neat, though I personally hate fixed-width layouts. Why can’t they make use of all of my 19″ monitor space? A simple fluid layout would have been nice.
“Cut the crap, do what you came here for”, I thought. Since I couldn’t find something like “Personal care” or “Beauty products” (?!) in the available products section, I decided to do a shop-wide search. The real irritation started!
[Click the image to open it in a new window, enlarged. For convenience sake, I have put a dim filter on the image, except for the areas of interest.]
As you can see from the image, the top bar lists out more product categories than the items in the search drop box. WTH? Doesn’t Indiaplaza know how to search in the other categories? Or probably it wants us to manually go through all the product listing pages to find ours. This made me very curious, I decided to check out the other famous (or atleast, whatever shopping stores I know!) online shopping sites.
[Click the image to enlarge it]Â
Indiatimes shopping has a decent search bar, prominently on top.  Whew, a good start. I typed in the name of the product I was looking for. I got a plain screen telling me that the search didn’t return anything. Â
Ok, it couldn’t find my product, but why can’t they show me a helpful screen of related products? Or atleast, how about giving me other options for my search string, in case I misspelt it? Hmm…
My next stop was rediff shopping. It has a nice search box and wonder of all wonders, when I started typing it automatically showed me a list of possible search strings. Wow! I felt kinda optimistic, I was not sure why.
[Click the image to enlarge]
My search returned the following screen. It showed the results for “800is”, not for my product. Where is the product I searched for????? I pressed back, thinking probably I mistyped in the search box. With the correct product I was looking for, in the search box, I did the search again.
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The same page X-(
Why cannot Rediff tell me at least that the product I searched for was not found?? Rediff.com looked to be in the other extremity of Indiaplaza.in, when it comes to reporting the search results. After having spent close to 1.30hrs in all the sites (Indiaplaza.in, Rediff, Sify & eBay)Â fruitlessly, I still haven’t found what I am looking for. And, with the sites in such a state, most probably won’t ever!
Hey
hmm.. pretty right.. the state of indian shopping sites is a very sad one as compared to the international shopping sites…
but i guess the range in all these sites are really excellent…maybe you could have tried changing your query a little bit and then tried.. maybe “Panasonic Shaver” or “Elecronic Shaver” i tried searching for the same in rediff shopping..
http://shop.rediff.com/shop/se.....rch=Search
Rajesh, I agree that the Indian sites list a lot of items. I dont have any qualms there. As mentioned in my post, the site was not helpful at all when it was not able to find what I was searching for. Why not offer me more options? Or why not try to understand the user’s search pattern, like how Amazon does? I guess, in that perspective, Indian sites have a long way to go.