Horrible online shopping experience!

Location/place: Bangalore

Name of company/service: Candidly Couture

This complaint is with regard to an online purchase that I made.
There exists a FaceBook page in the name of Candidly Couture (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Candidly-Couture/305150079515607) which puts up pictures of new collections of dresses, bags, shoes, skirts, etc and accepts orders of the same. It is run by a girl named Ishita Sharma(and maybe others).To place an order, one has to email them at [email protected] with the details.
The amount of trouble I went through by placing an order is heights! This is probably the WORST shopping experience I have ever had! I had placed my order for a black sequined skirt on the 22nd Dec 2012 and was told that it will come by New Year’s eve or there may be a slight delay. It is now 30th Jan 2013 and my skirt is nowhere in sight! The number of reasons made during the course of this one month has probably exhausted all possible options.
1 — She says the skirt has returned undelivered back to them.
If the skirt was not delivered, I should have got a call asking me to pick up the package from the courier service’s outlet. But I received no such call so this is definitely a lie.
2 — They said they will dispatch the skirt again and after asking many times, she agreed to share the tracking id as well.
Now this second package also never reached me and is supposed to have “got lost in transit”. In today’s world where everything is so organized and documented, it’s hard to believe that anything would just get “lost in transit”. If it was true that a package was lost like that by a courier company then they should be sued right away!
3 — She offers to place another order for me from their suppliers and I give her the go. This time, she promises to share the international tracking id.
I never got the tracking id for this. The reasons given for this were even more ridiculous! I was told that the suppliers take time to reply to mails because of the time difference. I know now that their suppliers are from China which is just 2.5 hours ahead of us in time so the difference cannot be blamed for not providing the tracking id for a period of 4 days!
Then she says she’s asked someone to mail me the tracking link and it should reach me by 22nd Jan. It had been about 5-6 days since the second order was(shoud have been) placed and for some reason, the tracking id was too difficult to obtain. And suddenly she says she has sent it to some Anusha Vijay which is obviously not me. So I provide my email id again. Then she says she doesn’t have access to internet when I see her posting pictures of new collections on Facebook!
What I don’t get is, that the shop is basically run online. The collections are displayed on Facebook, the orders are received through mail and the payment is done online. How can a person running such a business afford to not have access to internet for 5-6 days?! Lies were just being stacked one on top of another.
Clearly, I was very agitated at this point. And I sent them messages accordingly demanding for explanations and for some suitable action to be taken. Then she says my black skirt has arrived but has a defect. This was on 18th Jan! Now I had not wasted all my time and effort to receive a defected piece and I was definitely not going to change my choice of colour to suit her needs! She tells me that another black skirt is arriving the next day and I told her very clearly that that skirt must be sent to me at the very earliest given the situation. She agrees, but then of course, does her own thing and disappears.
Then finally I get a tracking id of a package being sent from China that is dispatched on 22nd Jan! It is scheduled to be delivered on the 29th Jan. What kind of service is this where the order itself is placed a month after receiving the money?! However, the hassle does not end there! When I check the status of the package on 29th, it has already been delivered to some Abhay on the 25th Jan itself! So a simple task of providing the correct address was too much to perform I guess!
When I confronted them regarding this, she refused to pick up my calls. And as soon as she realized there has been another mix up, she says she wants to refund the money and she did the next day. If I had to go through the hassle of being at their back at every step, accepting all the rubbish, waiting eagerly every week(I was promised that the skirt would reach me “next week” every single week) then my money back is not what I deserve! All she has to do is track the person who accepted the package and ensure that it reaches it’s correct owner! And a company like FedEx would definitely provide her the information needed.
Every single day I was told that the skirt would reach me within the next few days! And at the end, she has the audacity to tell me that I paid from someone else’s account and want the package delivered to someone else! If I decide to pay from my sister’s credit card and want the package delivered to my place in another name, it’s none of her business! For all I know, this is a college going girl who has set up a page on Facebook and is only shipping clothes and shoes from China and having them delivered to people. From what I’ve seen, there is 0% professionalism, they do not bother to reply unless prompted at least twice, they do not bother to keep the customer updated, they fail at very very simple operations such as getting the correct order delivered to the correct person! I have spent a LOT of time and energy in trying to work with her not to end up empty handed! I have been extremely patient too but that got me nowhere!
How tough is it to make sure the right package is delivered to the right person?! And how tough is it to track down the person who received my package and send it back to me?! At every single step, my order has been treated with extreme callousness and Ishita was least helpful and least interested in working things out! And then she says she has been at my every beck and call?! If lying to a customer every single day is what businesses these days call good customer service then I don’t know what things have come down to!
On doing my research, I found that there are others too who have placed complaints against this establishment. In my opinion, this business should not even be allowed to function! All it is going to do is make people agitated, throw packages from one corner to another, and lead to more complaints like this! Others who order from them are just going to be taken for a ride! It was a horrible experience for me. Please take severe action against them because they clearly don’t seem to be learning from previous mistakes nor are they even being sorry for the inconvenience caused to me!


Comments

One response to “Horrible online shopping experience!”

  1. I would like to take down my complaint. I believe the management and team handling Candidly Couture has been changed. I was approached by them with the intentions of making amends and they seemed quite serious about changing things around this time. I bought another product from them and was very satisfied with the service provided from the beginning till the end.

    I would recommend Candidly Couture to others.

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