Review of Pepperfry.com

Pepperfry is a relatively recent entrant into the world of e-shopping. Founded by a retired Ebay Country manager, Pepperfry.com cuts across categories like Gadgets, Home applicances, Health care appliances, Clothing and Sports goods. Pepperfry offers limited number of items in each category though, and is no way comparable to heavy weight shopping portals of the likes like Yebhi and Myntra, or even Ebay. However, Pepperfry has created a niche for itself by regularly offering discount coupons among the items it sells, albeit selling items at a much higher price than competitor sites. Pepperfry’s shipping time is the worst among most online shopping sites, and all items are shipped after 7 working days, which in effect may extend to about a month after full payment is made.

Ease of Shopping:

Search is limited to a Simple search, though in most cases you dont need the Search as the Product Category menu at the top suffices in taking you to the items you wish to buy. Item description on Pepperfry suffers from limitations in adequate description of item in terms of features, and in many cases you’re required to do an additional Google search for getting more information. This is a bad approach, as in many cases, customers become aware that the same item available elsewhere is overpriced on Pepperfry.com.

Payments:

Pepperfry offers a variety of payment options, and support all major credit and debit cards. However, Netbanking options of some major banks are notable by their absence. They claim to offer Cash on Delivery, however COD is not offered for items bought after availing of a coupon. Free shipping is offered. The payment process is rather irksome as in more often than not, the payment gateway communication with the site is terminated, and your money disappears into a black hole at least temporarily. In many cases they dont have an adequate response to your query about failed payments and it takes more than is customary to refund back to your bank account. If payment was being tried with a coupon, failed transactions lead to cancellation of coupons, and coupon can be activated only after calling up Customer Care and waiting an hour after they cancel the order manually. If you’ve been placing this order near coupon expiry deadline, you may be unable to order thereafter.

Shipping time and reliability of order completion:

Among the sites compared, Pepperfry offers the worst in terms of Time to ship following Order completion. The Shipping Time advertised on Pepperfry in most cases is “Within 7 ‘working days’ “. In contrast to all other sites, what this means is that in most cases, Pepperfry.com waits for around 15 days or more to ship an item. If you become impatient after a week of item placement and call up Pepperfry’s customer care, they have the nerve to remind you rather ingratiatingly that they had many holidays in the time interval, and that your item will be shipped within the deadlines. Having placed numerous orders on Pepperfry over the year, I’ve never found a single occasion where they’ve actually dispatched the goods within a week.

Pepperfry is also unique in failing to obey their own shipping deadlines, and failing to honour contract agreements. In many cases, they’ve faced numerous criticisms from customers where they’ve cancelled the orders because they’ve felt that they’ve underpriced items. Pepperfry is one of the unreliable shopping portals out there. If you need a quick delivery of an item, say to gift someone on time, stay away from Pepperfry. You may receive the item after a month or not at all.

Pepperfry also does not allow order cancellation. In case you require order cancellation, they will announce that they do not offer refund of your money, and will only provide you a coupon for future purchases. To add fuel to the fire, they have the nerve to tell you that this coupon expires in a week! In short, the Shipping and Returns on Pepperfry is the worst among E-commerce sites.

Ease of Availing Returns:

As mentioned above, Pepperfry does not allow order cancellation. In case you require order cancellation, they will announce that they do not offer refund of your money, and will only provide you a coupon for future purchases. To add fuel to the fire, they have the nerve to tell you that this coupon expires in a week! In short, the Shipping and Returns on Pepperfry is the worst among E-commerce sites. Shopping forums are rife with criticisms that Pepperfry does not even offer returns or refunds on items delivered in a damaged state. Even in cases where the mistake is on their part, Pepperfry customer care techs will try to sell off coupons for the hard earned money you’ve spent on their site.

After sales support and Enquiry

Pepperfry offers a Toll free number and Live Chat for enquiry and support. Ease of connecting to their support hotline is good. After sales handling of refund requests suffers from a bad Returns policy.

Promotions and Coupons

Pepperfry is one of the sites who actively promote marketing of their site through Periodic advertisements of coupons and deals. However beware of buying items on Pepperfry without a proper research of competitor sites, as Pepperfry.com is very well known for over-pricing items over and above all competitor sites. Items selling for around a thousand rupees are often sold for around many hundreds of rupees more than the competition. They probably do this to adjust the offers on coupons. They do regularly provide a variety of coupon discounts via email. If you’re a shrewd customer, you can often cut a good deal.

Additional Features/Comments

Poor after-sales support, unreliability of honoring agreements and extremely poor shipping time makes Pepperfry one of the worst E-commerce portals. However a shrewd shopper can avail of some discounts if he’s careful enough.