Tradus.com hasn’t been a happy haunting shopping destination for me so far.
I have purchased different products from their website thrice and gone through excruciating experience each time, thanks to their grotesque business model and flawed marketplace ecosystem.
My First Mistake: A Car Cover
About four months ago, I bought my first product – a car cover- which was of extremely low quality. I thought that would be a rare case and I should continue to trust Tradus with the kind of products they offer at their marketplace.
My Second Mistake: A Digital Scale
The next product was a digital weight scale machine. Aside from the shoddy quality, it also reached me rather late. But that’s Tradus for you. When I unpacked the parcel, I found a portion of it was already broken in transit, and the digital scale showed faulty results every second hour. How could a person weigh differently across different parts of the day? Plus, I found it was a cheap Chinese product and didn’t even have any warranty covered.
I contacted the customer care and expressed my disappointment and asked them to give me a refund. However, it wasn’t easy – I was asked to ship it back to them and send them my account number with enough proof about my identity. I had already wasted much time dealing with a faulty product, shipping it back to Gurgaon and communicating them about the same. I told them to not worry about the refund and give me a redeemable gift voucher instead.
However, when I tried shopping around the marketplace to choose form their collection, I found that most of the products they sell are of extremely low quality listed by sellers that would NOT hesitate to cheat their customers to make a living.
So Why Did I Buy?
After browsing through their products, I chose to buy something that would not be found broken during transit – a pack of six towels, a tummy trimmer, and a handcrafted sling bag. The last item reached me first and I was surprised to see its poor packaging. It was wrapped in a white plastic bag with my address written on it. It didn’t even say where it was from and what it contained inside. There was no trace of Tradus.com on it at all.
How can a seller pack their product with absolutely no sense of aesthetics or branding?
But then that’s Tradus for you!
The next two products reached me more or less in the same fashion but I decided to live with them.
My Third Mistake: Samsung Grand Smartphone
I’ve never been a fan of Samsung products anyway, but I thought I would buy my would-be wife a smartphone for she is not savvy enough to use an iPhone and doesn’t know Android from iOS. Plus, I thought Samsung Grand would be a good choice for her to start with.
MySmartPrice suggested Tradus.com based on the lowest price criteria. But for obvious reasons, I was rather skeptical about choosing the same marketplace again. I however wanted to give them a third chance and decided to buy the phone from one of their sellers in Gurgaon.
Their email said the item would be shipped to me in the next four days, and I even got an sms that the product had been dispatched to the courier and a tracking number would be sent to me in the next 24 hours. But it was not supposed to happen – blame it on my so-called destiny or Tradus.com’s egregious ecosystem.
After my frequent emails, messages on Facebook and Twitter, they decided to contact me to know my concerns. They explored the source of my frustrations and said they would find out what caused the delay. It turns out the seller hadn’t actually dispatched the item and had sent me the sms inadvertently.
The four-day timeline had already passed and I was absolutely livid with how they were handling my concerns. In the meanwhile, I was curious to notice they didn’t have a good rating online. They had a lot of bad reviews and frustrated customers, and understandably so.
I realized Tradus.com is an online marketplace built around selling cheap products with no customer satisfaction principles in mind.
Finally, they informed me that they had dispatched the item via First Flight courier. I assumed the least they would do to contain a customer so frustrated was ship the item via a priority courier service, but the item had been sent via a standard courier service with a promise to reach me in not less than five days. They even gave me a tracking code for the same which never got updated while the shipment was in transit.
They didn’t have an answer to what was going on. So they kept saying they were in touch with the seller and would do their best to get the product delivered in time and safely.
I know they were NOT the ones to trust. So I called up the local courier agency of FirstFlight who informed me that the product had indeed reached their branch and they would be sending it to me in the afternoon.
Somebody from Tradus.com gave me a call to know what my concerns were about, and I said I’d already done the job for them and they shouldn’t worry about me anymore. There last reply was:
Thanks for taking the trouble, Sushant!
But that’s Tradus.com for you!
Wait! If you think the story is over, think again!
Just when I opened the parcel to see if everything was in order, I found something was amiss! What was it?
The invoice itself!
Are you kidding me? You ask. But look who’s kidding with their customers – yes, you’re right – the amazingly awesomely astoundingly customer-friendly Tradus.com.
I wrote to the customer care department to see what the deal was about, and here’s what they said:
Dear Mr. Sahoo,
This is with regards to Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos I9082 Mobile Phone (Metallic Blue) With Free Sennheiser Headset worth Rs.2290/- against the sub order id:10564750_01. I sincerely regret that the invoice was not sent by the seller DBMindia along with the product. Thank you for writing to us. We regret the circumstances under which you wrote to us. The invoice has been arranged by the seller. Please find the attachment of the same.
2 responses
I had never heard of tradus.com before reading your article. I went to the website and see that it is not really a shop in itself, but instead it is just an internet presence for stores to sell their products through.
The first thing I had to do when visiting the site was choose whether I was in Delhi, Mumbai, or Bangalore. There were no other options. I thought that was really odd until I actually got into the product listings to see that there are a lot of fresh and frozen food products sold there, so of course they do not want to ship long distances.
The website itself is very poorly done; I did not follow through the actual order process but there is no way I would enter a credit card number into such a sad excuse for a website.
When I choose one of the 3 cities and started actually looking at products, I noticed that there were really only a handful of shops to buy the merchandise from. I also noticed that those shops had either no ratings at all or were rated 1 out of 5. At the top of the screen was a listing of “Top stores in xxxxx”, and that was the only way to find any store at all that had good ratings. However I could not get to products from those companies except through their individual store entries (not through the regular product search or browse functions).
Even when choosing stores from the listing of “Top stores in xxxx”, I find it very hard to find one that looks trustworthy. Only when I choose “Delhi” for my city do I even find one single store that has more than 100 ratings; Aggarwhal International. Seriously, out of all the stores selling on tradus.com in any of the 3 selectable cities there is only one single store that even has over 100 ratings, and almost every store in any of the 3 cities has 0 to 3 ratings. That is absurd!
Definitely tradus.com is a very poorly done website. It really looks like there are a lot of very bad stores doing business through tradus.com, and those are the ones that show up when you browse products or search. I would never use this website to make a purchase, but if I had to then I would select a very highly rated store from the “Top stores in xxxx” links at the top and browse their selections. If one of those highly rated stores didn’t have the product I wanted, then there would be no purchase.
I think you are misdirecting your rant. Tradus.com does not sell any products at all, they are just a storefront for a number of local businesses who pay tradus.com for advertising their products. Judging by the low number of ratings that are present for the stores on tradus.com, it really does not look like it is a very popular place to buy products at all. If it is low in popularity it probably does not make much money from the stores that do business through it. If it does not make much money from the stores that do business through it, it cannot really be expected to do a very good job of policing those stores.
As people living in an internet world, it is our responsibility to use caution in our monetary dealings online. There is nothing at all about the stores on tradus.com that would make me trust them, and the website itself is bad enough that there is no way in hell I would ever enter any personal information there. Caveat emptor.
Thanks for your insightful comment, Jim! I appreciate your time!