My terrible yet oddly fantastic Black Friday shopping experience

We all felt that Daraz’s Black Friday deals were a complete farce since valuable items weren’t available on discount.

Awais Imran December 03, 2015
As a technology enthusiast, I have always been in awe of the incredible deals that go live on Black Friday in the US and Europe. So, when Daraz, Kaymu, and HomeShopping announced they would be offering similar deals in Pakistan on November 27th, they had my curiosity!

Two days before Black / White / what-you-may-call-it Friday deals went live, Daraz announced they would be selling the 16GB iPhone 6S for an unbelievable Rs62,279. That’s $590. This was simply the lowest price for an iPhone 6S anywhere in the world!

They first had my curiosity, now they had my attention.

When the deal went live at midnight on November 27th, I already had the iPhone 6S in my cart on Daraz.pk. I quickly clicked on ‘Confirm Order’ only to be shown a fatal error. After snooping around, I discovered that Daraz had altogether removed the discounted iPhone 6S from its site less than two minutes after the deal went live.

This abrupt removal of valuable products was their first mistake on Black Friday.

Annoyed at Daraz for having wasted my time, I posted this message on Facebook, as well as on the popular Pakistan Startups group:



There are many other posts (each of those is a separate link, by the way) of people sharing similarly bad experiences. We all felt that Daraz’s Black Friday deals were a complete farce since valuable items weren’t available on discount, and the items that were available on discount were of no real value. This is besides general availability issues, and poor customer support.

Later that same day, however, after regularly checking Daraz’s listings for the iPhone 6S, my colleagues at Jumpshare were able to order not one, not two, but three iPhone 6Ss — one of which had my name on it. (Thanks Naveed, Jahanzeb, and Ghaus!)

As Pakistanis, we generally don’t trust businesses to put customers first, so I maintained my state of disbelief until two days ago when I successfully received my brand new iPhone 6S for 62,279 PKR — as marketed by Daraz.

Yes, I was able to successfully purchase a valuable, discounted item on Black Friday in Pakistan!

This reminded me of Hanlon’s Razor:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

These online shopping websites weren’t out to make a grand fool out of all of us. They were simply unable to meet the hype they had generated themselves, and were further unable to control the damage they were causing to their reputation.

Daraz’s second crippling mistake was poor reputation management.

Daraz delivered it in two working days.

I feel there is a strong communication gap between their marketing, sales, and IT teams. Instead of removing products from the site, they could’ve shown an ‘out of stock’ message. Instead of boisterously claiming they were ready to handle all of Pakistan’s online population, they could’ve actually prepared their site to handle so much traffic.

Let your work speak for itself.

They should’ve particularly allocated more resources to customer support. Furthermore, an honest blog post from their upper management transparently detailing what went wrong with their operations on Black Friday would immensely help reduce negative word of mouth.

All in all, I believe this was a great learning experience for our online shopping websites. I expect even better Black Friday deals and experiences from Daraz, HomeShopping and perhaps even Flipkart in 2016.

Alright, back to work on my Windows blog, and e-Commerce website.

The post originally appeared here.
WRITTEN BY:
Awais Imran The author is a Growth Engineer at Jumpshare by day, and an Internet entrepreneur by night. He is the co-founder of WindowsClan and PriceOye.pk. He is also an occasional public speaker on personal growth and blogging. He posts at (facebook.com/waisybabu)
The views expressed by the writer and the reader comments do not necassarily reflect the views and policies of the Express Tribune.

COMMENTS (3)

Fatema | 8 years ago | Reply "They first had my curiosity, now they had my attention." Gahaha I see what you did there :P
sabundani | 8 years ago | Reply You are so right. When it comes to people like Daraaz, DO NOT EVER trust them with anything other than Cash On Delivery. They couldn't handle their Black Friday traffic and it's been over a week now and I still haven’t got my stuff. All I got instead was a phone call from a confused lady who pretended I had just placed an order... when in fact it has been 8 days. Here is a recording of that call. I have edited my name and the name of the products out of it. You have my permission to use this however you see fit. Download it, copy-paste it. Whatever. https://vimeo.com/147838180
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