Why are most Indian tech ecomm websites unusable?

[calvin1719]

By unusable, I mean either incredibly slow, or with no or near useless filtering options, or bad data that makes filtering useless, or a combination of the 3.

For the first, a prime example is primeabgb. The site's performance is abominable, its price sorting is so screwed up sorting low to high shows a 60K SKU before a 1K SKU.
Most popular sites, including MD, Vedant, PCstudio, EZPZ, etc. are guilty of the second. Primeabgb is an exception for this, but that brings us to...

Bad data:
Look at this shit. What's the point of the filtering if your data is bad? How hard is it to get clean data for your backend?

In this example, you might say, "It's just 1 bad data point". But if they can miscategorize a 1TB drive as 500GB, how many 500GB drives have they mislabelled? How is the user expected to browse all 500GB drives they have?

Are Indian tech ecomm sites just offline stores playing at being online businesses? It really seems that way since none of them care to make it convenient to browse. Sure, if you know exactly what you want, search for it, add to cart, and checkout. That much works fairly okay. But other than, it's just an abject failure of any attempt to inject even a modicum of good UX.

Earlier, Amazon used to have fantastic filters, even if the data was a bit sketchy, it mostly worked. Now it has a bunch of useless filters and searching for stuff is a PITA. I will say though, that The IT Depot seems to be an exception to all 3 of these, and that tracks as they started out as, and primarily still are, an online store.

 

[seshu]

just out of curiosity,
have you communicated this to those websites and how they responded ...

they seldom spend good amount for the website development ...
data entry is a routine done by a small team without adequate care

 

[kalph09]

It’s worse with smaller Lala shops from SP Road running a website. They don’t invest in regular upkeep because its an extra expense. Other than marketing. They serve no purpose.

I have called couple of times. Their response is usually same. Visit our shop, we’ll give you better price.

 

[nagbbv]

not only tech, most of the other ecom websites filtering options are useless. no proper results in searching or filtering.

 

[gourav]

I find that MDcomputers has a very good website. Which makes sense because they've been in online business long before others entered. Prime (including its sister site onlyssd) is decent, so is vedant. Vishalperipherals has good prices, but the site is usually not very responsive. ITdepot is decent on PC, practically unusable on phone, which is surprising because ITdepot has been there forever and should have had invested more in this.

Other than these, I usually avoid because unless you know someone who can vouch for it, you can never be sure which ones are genuine and which ones are not.

There was this website where I ordered a custom t-shirt for a friend's birthday. The website said they'll deliver in a week and birthday was 12 days away. So I ordered. 3 days after the birthday had passed they sent an email asking me to provide a new picture as the provided picture was low quality. I told them it was two weeks since the order was placed and asked for a refund. They responded saying they don't have a refund policy. Never responded to any emails after that and their phone numbers were unreachable. They just kept my 500 rupees and I couldn't do anything. Since then, I've been wary of using unknown ecommerce sites. I only go to reputed ones.

 

[lockhrt999]

Reason 1: There's no demand for it. Everything works by the principles of demand and supply. We are a rare breed demanding search or filtration based on minute things.

Reason 2: Most of the companies are run by MBAs. So everything is rushed to market in India. Half-assing things is norm now.

And, you don't even need to talk about other websites. Search "VPN" on TE.

 

[calvin1719]

have you communicated this to those websites and how they responded

No, because I have better things to do with my time. They don't even have any contacts on the sites for anyone who can actually do anything about it. It's not going to serve any purpose me sending a message to a sales or after sales person a message about how useless their site is.

I find that MDcomputers has a very good website.

Agreed. MD appears to be a lot better than the others.

It’s worse with smaller Lala shops from SP Road running a website. They don’t invest in regular upkeep because its an extra expense. Other than marketing. They serve no purpose.

I have called couple of times. Their response is usually same. Visit our shop, we’ll give you better price.

Exactly the problem. They are offline businesses with token web presence, and they want to bring you in to the shop because that's the kind of selling they are used to and can do - providing false info or misleading info to customers who aren't savvy, pushing old/stale stock instead of the one that the customer wants, pretending they don't have it... The ones I listed have invested in an ecommerce platform more than the smaller ones, but they are still not all in and not willing to put in the effort to have a decent site.

 

[TEUser2K1]

Let us hope ONDC platform proposed by govt. will bring a change to this.

 

[calvin1719]

Let us hope ONDC platform proposed by govt. will bring a change to this.

I highly doubt it. The platform costs may be removed with ONDC, but the primary blocker - investment for clean data, adherence to ONDC protocols etc., and regular upkeep - will not be.

 

[t3chg33k]

By unusable, I mean either incredibly slow, or with no or near useless filtering options, or bad data that makes filtering useless, or a combination of the 3.

For the first, a prime example is primeabgb. The site's performance is abominable, its price sorting is so screwed up sorting low to high shows a 60K SKU before a 1K SKU.
Most popular sites, including MD, Vedant, PCstudio, EZPZ, etc. are guilty of the second. Primeabgb is an exception for this, but that brings us to...

Bad data:
Look at this shit. What's the point of the filtering if your data is bad? How hard is it to get clean data for your backend?
View attachment 136722

In this example, you might say, "It's just 1 bad data point". But if they can miscategorize a 1TB drive as 500GB, how many 500GB drives have they mislabelled? How is the user expected to browse all 500GB drives they have?

Are Indian tech ecomm sites just offline stores playing at being online businesses? It really seems that way since none of them care to make it convenient to browse. Sure, if you know exactly what you want, search for it, add to cart, and checkout. That much works fairly okay. But other than, it's just an abject failure of any attempt to inject even a modicum of good UX.

Earlier, Amazon used to have fantastic filters, even if the data was a bit sketchy, it mostly worked. Now it has a bunch of useless filters and searching for stuff is a PITA. I will say though, that The IT Depot seems to be an exception to all 3 of these, and that tracks as they started out as, and primarily still are, an online store.

For some of the hardware stuff, you don't even have relevant filters on Amazon for capacity. Flipkart has more relevant filters in that regard but the list is an automated mess where every variation of a word is listed in the filter. Bottom line is that the design itself is rubbish, followed by complete absence of a data cleaning process.

 

[gourav]

For some of the hardware stuff, you don't even have relevant filters on Amazon for capacity

Amazon's filters are absolute crap. Unless every product feature is mentioned in the product name itself, Amazon will fail to filter it out.
Which is what leads to sellers putting products names like these:

People praise Amazon's search and apparently its search capabilities are the reason it's at the top. Here's a search for laptops between 30000 and 40000

Only one of the laptops is priced between 30k and 40k. What good is this search?

These companies might have reached the top for whatever reason, but today they're there only because of their clout and brand recognition. Their UI/Ux is far worse than many tiny ecommerce sites, especially Amazon's. Flipkart's is much better than Amazon.

 

[nRiTeCh]

I had a terrible exp. once in yr 2020, cant recall the site. I was browsing and found one item I think ram or proccy cant recall, added to cart and during checkout a different product used to appear while price been same...

 

[ibose]

Most of them reuse/customise existing cheap shopping cart solutions instead of building something bespoke. One would have thought that with the business volume they get online, they would do something better. Amazon and FK are only a little better but their search and categorization is pathetic.
Newegg is good when it comes to filtering when I looked a year back.

 

[icysmoke]

By unusable, I mean either incredibly slow, or with no or near useless filtering options, or bad data that makes filtering useless, or a combination of the 3.

For the first, a prime example is primeabgb. The site's performance is abominable, its price sorting is so screwed up sorting low to high shows a 60K SKU before a 1K SKU.
Most popular sites, including MD, Vedant, PCstudio, EZPZ, etc. are guilty of the second. Primeabgb is an exception for this, but that brings us to...

Bad data:
Look at this shit. What's the point of the filtering if your data is bad? How hard is it to get clean data for your backend?
View attachment 136722

In this example, you might say, "It's just 1 bad data point". But if they can miscategorize a 1TB drive as 500GB, how many 500GB drives have they mislabelled? How is the user expected to browse all 500GB drives they have?

Are Indian tech ecomm sites just offline stores playing at being online businesses? It really seems that way since none of them care to make it convenient to browse. Sure, if you know exactly what you want, search for it, add to cart, and checkout. That much works fairly okay. But other than, it's just an abject failure of any attempt to inject even a modicum of good UX.

Earlier, Amazon used to have fantastic filters, even if the data was a bit sketchy, it mostly worked. Now it has a bunch of useless filters and searching for stuff is a PITA. I will say though, that The IT Depot seems to be an exception to all 3 of these, and that tracks as they started out as, and primarily still are, an online store.

They dont have enough resources. You need certain level of tech and product knowledge to have a half decent shopping website. Shopify makes things easier but that still needs development. I work as a marketing and product consultant and have consulted companies ranging from million dollar valuations to billion dollar valuations. The product journeys arent great many times even at the biggies. You are probably underestimating the knowledge it takes to build a good usable product.

 

[blr_p]

Amazon's filters are absolute crap. Unless every product feature is mentioned in the product name itself, Amazon will fail to filter it out.

Which is what leads to sellers putting products names like these:
View attachment 136776

People praise Amazon's search and apparently its search capabilities are the reason it's at the top. Here's a search for laptops between 30000 and 40000
View attachment 136778
Only one of the laptops is priced between 30k and 40k. What good is this search?

These companies might have reached the top for whatever reason, but today they're there only because of their clout and brand recognition. Their UI/Ux is far worse than many tiny ecommerce sites, especially Amazon's. Flipkart's is much better than Amazon.

Exactly what I was thinking. I have to resort to google many times to find stuff.

Amazon is not all that much better at finding things either

 

[calvin1719]

I don't know what happened for them to remove the filters that they had. Just as an example, they had a detailed filter for brands/manufacturer for all categories, where you could select from ALL the brands that showed up in the particular category that you were looking at. Now it's just a short of list of 5-6 brands that's entirely useless. I wonder what sort of braindead business decision making went into this change.