Trustless E-Commerce-Part-1
First the pain and then the solution. About two weeks back, I bought an Amazon firestick, a second gen 2020 version for an older TV. A grave mistake for stepping out of Amazon.com for their product. However, a lesson well learnt and a possible new way of working is what I want to write about.
As amazon phased out all their old stock, I was left with the only option of looking for other ecommerce vendors selling these products. The typical go to solution is of course google. I used, google to search and this particular website listed on top of search results, in fact next to Amazon.com.
Knowing that the search engine employs a lot of rules before a site can list number one, I was fairly confident that this must be a legitimate business, product was listed at a significant discount and my mind gave a greenlight and I was 90% ok to buy from here. Looks like SEO won here.
Still, I did a cursory check for mouth shut reviews but this site used Trustpilot for its review management and managed to keep a healthy score. Once this was done, I checked if the product was listed as NEW and the reason for deep markdown was that it was an old version of the product. So, thinking there is nothing wrong here I placed my order. Just to ensure there are no delays, this was indeed customer feedback, I read somewhere, I made it a cash on delivery order, just so that the vendor is motivated to ship the product early.
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Order came via blue dart, the courier delivery partner, he handed the sealed package and I paid up via a payment wallet. So far, so good. But once I opened the product, I knew it was previously opened but still some times these people check if the product is working before, they ship it, So I assumed like so but the horror revealed more as I opened more. It was a used product with scratches all over. I am still thinking there must be a mistake or a refurb was sent to me.
I wrote an email to the customer support and then pinged on WhatsApp. The support guy wanted an unboxing video. Imagine, after doing all this, I should have taken an unboxing video to show as proof of what was received by me. There was no invoice in the package, no warranty card and he asked me for the product serial no. Poor me still did not realize he was scamming, I after a lot of difficulty sent him a picture with the serial no and he immediately screams, that is not matching with his records and further called me a jerk and said, if the product is defective, only amazon.com is responsible and I need to work with them.
Call it poor customer service, this was terrible. I was upset for two days at this episode but this website has the temerity to send me a review request on trustpilot.com or it was some automatic workflow which he had not much control. I went to trust pilot and reviewed my experience. A day later Trustpilot came back said, they need evidence to support my bad review. I sent them the information I had and they accepted.
I tried using the product, it was like working 50%. The streaming device was working but not the remote. Customer support of this website still insists that I am scamming him for a new product.
Now I am going to stop here and see how this workflow/process flow can be reimagined in the web3/block chain way. Web3 needs to solve small problems first before we can tackle the meta problems to save the world. Trust less technology needs to prove itself to the masses and what more than ecommerce to prove its worth?
Stay Tuned…thinking…
