Share your experiences dealing with India businesses?

[deusExMachina]

What are your experiences using services/buying from within the country (both resellers and manufacturers)? Especially after the Galwan thing, I started off trying to buy from Indian companies as much as possible but it seems pointless to buy with that perspective. Most of them (there are exceptions) provide very bad after sales service on top of the (relatively) exorbitant prices. It's like you're going out of your way to reward poor quality things/service.

A lot of them (in this bad group) have an attitude of doing us a favour to sell to us, especially when they're somewhat of a monopoly locally. This particular attitude especially shows when you aren't buying in large quantities, like they don't care about the small time buyers. I've honestly had MUCH better interactions with the sellers at Aliexpress back when it was a place to buy from.

There was a thread in here a while ago about how Amazon negatively affects the small time sellers and I did empathized at the time, but looking back. I don't think they deserve that consideration, we'll buy from the sellers outside of the Amazon platform if they provide a customer experience/service that's similar (doesn't have to be as good but get at least the basics).

Long story short, my take is that as buyers we should just buy from wherever we get a good service/deal instead of trying to prop up the businesses that are undeserving of our wallet-vote.

 

[lockhrt999]

I agree with your experience.

Vendors that I have interacted with, have no desire to do business correctly. They are always in haste. They want to sale stuff as fast as is it possible. So there's no room left quality control, good packaging or after sales service. They don't like people who ask a lot questions or people who want to think out of the box.

On service side, India lacks educated or skilled labour.

The coin has other side too! I have been an online seller from quite some time. I always tried to present my products with accurate description, I wrote manuals, took very professional photographs. Built ecosystem around the products. However, I learnt the hard way that there's no reward for doing all that extra work. Other sellers who didn't do all that work were making just as much as me or more. Just like the sellers you mentioned, the janata is also chyavanprash.

In short, typical Indian sellers complement well to typical Indian buyers. We are bunch of odd men out. We got spoiled by international companies and expected same behaviour from Indian counterparts.

This difference is highly visible with B2B websites. China's best contender 'Alibaba' vs India's best contender 'IndiaMart'. Did I mention that IndiaMart is older than Alibaba? With all that head start and then similar economies, IndiaMart has evolved into a turd whereas Alibaba today makes the global supply chain.

 

[nRiTeCh]

I have somewhat mixed exp.

Businesses in Mumbai are actually truly biz minded and they do want to do pure biz while not letting down their customer. Have dealt with various shops across diff. businesses and backgrounds since decades and will say even small gully shops really know well how to catch hold and retain customer. They value their customers and even guide them properly and can even go an extra mile.. They are ready to listen and even implement and change their course of action if required, aks they value customer suggestions/feedback!

Whereas its mostly opposite in Pune. Here the bizmen only have to do biz just because he is doing for the sake of god knows or only he knows... nor he is interested in entertaining his customer nor he even cares about his queries or guide him appropriately. Forget this, they talk in a very arrogant lingo if we question, it comes on their egos as if they doing some favor or offering anything free to the customer. Pathetic biz mind here!

And that 1:30pm - 4p time..the city literally sleeps in this time 365 days no matter what deal they get during this time period they are only interested in hurrying up to shut down their shops, run home and go to sleep only to return by late 4:30p.

Just 2 weeks ago my businessman buddies from Mumbai and Nasik came down to Pune for some biz meets and they were rather disappointed. Point was all the suppliers were very adamant and not ready to listen or cast products according to my firiends demand + costing was same or a bit high. So friends went back to Mumbai and gave biz to one Mumbai and a Chennai party saving on cost + getting customized commodity!

 

[deusExMachina]

Businesses in Mumbai are actually truly biz minded and they do want to do pure biz while not letting down their customer. Have dealt with various shops across diff. businesses and backgrounds since decades and will say even small gully shops really know well how to catch hold and retain customer. They value their customers and even guide them properly and can even go an extra mile.. They are ready to listen and even implement and change their course of action if required, aks they value customer suggestions/feedback!

Interesting, I didn't make this connection before but the few handful of business that I mentioned in the OP that were good to deal with.... the majority of them were from Mumbai, a few from Gujarat and one from Kerala.