PATHETIC and UNETHICAL!!!!! I wish I could give them a negative rating.
PLEASE DO READ ALL THE REVIEWS AND TAKE A CALL! The number of one-star ratings is ~ 130!!!!!
I am not using them for 4 months - I integrated my Shopify store with them 4 months ago, but started selling products only less than a month ago on my store and stopped selling 2 weeks ago, thanks to Shiprocket.
This review has 2 parts:
1st part is my initial review
2nd part is the list of SERIOUS CHALLENGES I faced with them. Please keep these in mind before going for them so that you do not suffer later - you lose precious money and time (days - weeks in my case), your valuable reputation, and your peace of mind. I suggest you spend 15 minutes right now to save yourself from lots of trouble later.
1st PART BEGINS:
I would encourage you to take into consideration all these factors before going for them - PLEASE READ THEIR REVIEWS AND ASK YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGER ALL THESE QUESTIONS, OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE IN SERIOUS TROUBLE.
I started my dropshipping business 3 weeks ago. Over this time, I have given Shiprocket a business of ~ 50 INR K - could be more than that. I have a small business, and I am working alone right now. I was getting more than 100 orders per day as well.
However, I have faced MULTIPLE SERIOUS CHALLENGES with the services of Shiprocket, and my new business is on the verge of shutting down. Bottom line ~ 70% RTOs. I was literally begging my account manager to help me before writing this review.
We put in a lot of time (many days) to manually call the customers to confirm orders. We also sent WhatsApp confirmation messages to them. The same customers were later calling us to say that, if you cannot deliver, why do you take orders?
Rather than spending time on expanding my business, product research, marketing, and analysis, I am spending the whole day on non-deliveries and RTOs. I understand some of them were genuine RTOs. However, many, and I mean many of them, were initiated by the delivery partners. I pay on average ~ INR 170 to Shiprocket for shipping for every order, and I am working on wafer-thin margins.
This is what I have faced in many cases. I have the recordings also:
- The delivery partner is asking the customer to cancel the order, giving multiple reasons
- They tell the customer that the order will be fake
- They refuse to travel to the customer's home even if it is 2-3 km away,
- They do not call the customer even once, and many customers have told me that they had no clue when they were contacted - they tell me, just like they took my call, they would have taken any other call
- They call them from IVR, and in many cases, customers who are unable to call back on IVR are helpless
- They tell the customer that their home is out of the service area. My question: Why did you agree to deliver in the first place? and charge me for forward delivery, and now I have to pay for RTO as well.
They claim they make 3 attempts to a customer for delivery, but in many cases, they do not make even one. Also, the solution they have given me is to hire a person to call customers for deliveries.
This is a loss of revenue for me - many customers have cancelled because of these delivery partners; there is a loss of reputation - delivery partners telling the customers that the orders would be fake; I have to pay for forward delivery charges and RTO charges as well. I can't afford this much wastage of my money and time, which could otherwise have been used in more productive activities
Last week's example - I must have spent ~8-9 hours per day on such issues, and then was awake the entire night to place the orders in the system, because I can call my customers in the daytime only.
The entire day, I call the RTO customers. I cannot take more orders because of these challenges; the previous orders are not fulfilled, I do not get my revenue, and I can't pay my suppliers, who want advance payment. I have proof (recordings) that many of them are because of the problems I mentioned above. Also, I do not get time at all to analyse the performance of my business!
Customer support is useless and gives set answers even after I share the recordings. They say that they will refund the forward delivery and RTO charges when deliveries are improper. I spend my entire day calling customers to get recordings as proof. But no success.
My average order number was 100 per day, and I was selling only one product. What would happen if I sold more than 1 product, and the orders increased to more than 1000 per day? Should I keep on hiring people to call the customers? Does ShipRocket have no accountability?
I have many orders in transit, but I do not know how they will be fulfilled. And I have orders with me that I am scared to place with them now. Rather than wasting money on undelivered orders and fake RTOs, I would rather cancel the customer orders. SERIOUSLY DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO.
2nd PART BEGINS:
FAKE RTOs - My number of delivered orders is 90, and RTOs are more than 170 in number, ALMOST 70% of my orders. This is a joke. Do they want me to assume that 70% of my customers returned the product? I called many customers myself and have proof that MANY were fake RTOs. Customers are calling from their side and enquiring about the product. I had no answer. I have recordings. I am not saying all are fake, but many of them are. Why should there be even 1 fake RTO when I am paying you for forward delivery in advance without asking any questions?
Again, we manually called customers for days to confirm orders. We also sent WhatsApp confirmation messages to them. The same customers were later calling us to say that if you cannot deliver, why do you take orders?
Let's assume out of 170, only 85 (50%) were fake RTO - I am confident that it will be more. Product price = 699/- Revenue loss = 699 X 85 = Rs. 59,415 for a business that has begun operations a couple of weeks ago. I stopped my business ~ 2 weeks ago because of a lack of funds - you have to pay your suppliers in advance and run ads. I went for early COD with Shiprocket, and because I was working on wafer-thin margins, I thought of cancelling it as it costs me ~1% of my sales, but I am glad I went for it. Otherwise, I might still be waiting for the money from those 90 deliveries - by the way, it's stuck on 89/90 for I do not know how many days.
One time, after all these challenges, they stopped my COD remittance payment also- because my wallet went into negative because of RTOs, and they told me to first recharge, and then they will release it.
Also, now to sell these fake RTO units, I have to again pay the forward delivery charges (assuming none of them are RTO) and run Meta ads.
They claim they make 3 attempts for every delivery. The reality is that sometimes they will not even make one, and even if they make one and the customer is not available, the delivery person will ask them to cancel. The delivery person will take the customer's cancellation OTP and cancel the order. Later, you have to waste your time with customer support, giving them phone recordings, and they will reply with standard answers that the OTP was provided by the customer. Then you tell them that please listen to the recordings and that the delivery partner asked the customer to provide the cancellation OTP. You will be caught in a whirlpool of emails going to and fro, Excel sheets, maintaining a record of tickets - some tickets will be closed without your consent, some will be partially closed. You cannot raise a reattempt request for RTO even if it is fake, and you have the recording. Then you raise a ticket and make a record of it, and you get some reply after 2 days, so match it with the many spreadsheets that you have maintained day-wise. In my case, I have many Excel sheets for every day. E-commerce is a business where one tries to reach the masses, do upselling, do retargeting, and try to convert customers, but here they have made it a B2B kind of affair, where you have long sales cycles and you end up making multiple calls to multiple stakeholders for your deliveries.
And there have been cases where customers were not contacted even once (manual or IVR), and it went to RTO. I have recordings, and it is clear that customers are not lying. It appears as if they do not even have the intention to make deliveries.
Delivery partners will refuse to go to the customer's location and ask them to travel to their office or some other location; otherwise cancel. Please put yourself in the customer's shoes and tell me what you would do in such a situation. And then the customer support will tell that they got the OTP from the end customer.
Delivery partners will not call them from their mobile phones, and the IVR call will go. If the customers are not able to pick up, they can't call back - attempt counted.
And, if delivery partners can't go to the customer address, why did Shiprocket take the delivery in the first place - to earn freight charges, forward delivery, + RTO - for free?
In some cases, delivery partners told the customer that because they had ordered from Facebook/Instagram, the product would be fake, so please cancel - I have those recordings also with the customer and with the delivery partner - and then I was requesting the customer to reconsider or make a video when opening the packet.
And why should I spend many hours every day or hire people to check the authenticity of the deliveries? It costs money, and when I am paying Shiprockeet, why should I spend more money for the same purpose? I stopped doing everything else and started doing this work. It was as if I were working for Shiprocket to complete the deliveries.
Even after escalations, no proper steps were taken. Today, a customer called me enquiring about the package. For this customer, I had given them the recording on Friday, and Shiprocket themselves had told me to call the customer for a landmark. Why should I call? I provided the details also, but still, till evening, no delivery.
This is all I remember right now. I will edit later if I remember something more.
They simply have a website, but ALMOST ZERO EXECUTION and ZERO CONTROL ON THE GROUND.
AGAIN, PLEASE DO READ ALL THE REVIEWS AND TAKE A CALL!