By Hunky Be aware, as the title of the article suggests, Flipkart has silently changed their operating process and have introduced cancellation fee for customers who cancel their orders. Let’s take a look at details of this process.
What is a cancellation fee?
The seller, in this case platform, Flipkart will charge you, the customer a “fee” for cancellation of any placed order. It is as simple as that. But it raises few more questions on the actual process. As how this works.
What are the actual terms n condition?
Flipkart, as a company has clearly underlined that it has reserved the right to change / alter / remove or add anything to their terms of use without any notice to customers or anyone else. As of writing this article, below screenshot shows the present terms.
It appears that, as of now, certain products will attract this cancellation fee. Once order is placed, confirmed or dispatched, Flipkart users can’t cancel the order anymore for free. Even when the order delivery is refused by the customer, Flipkart will charge a cancellation fee.
That is not all, Flipkart may not even allow you cancellation of order in certain products at all. Once the order is placed, in this case you have to receive the product.
Some products may have a certain “free” cancellation time frame. You may cancel for free within that time or otherwise, a cancellation fee will be charged or as it seems in case of some products, cancellation will not be allowed at all.
How to know which products are “Free” to cancel and which has “cancellation fee”?
You have to pay attention to the detailed product listing & their website or application user interface. For example, here is a back cover that I am ordering for one my phone. Product page is showing following,
Right where you may check for the information or option about return / replacement, there, a new icon can be seen mentioning, “Cancellation upto 24 hrs”. So this product can only be cancelled within 24 hours of order placement and after which no cancellation option will be available, and I have to accept the product.
After 24 hours of order placement, as described in Flipkart cancellation fee terms and conditions, the order information page of their website of app has no option for requesting a cancellation.
How will this affect you?
There are many ways it will change your shopping style, like for example, if you order an item with long far away delivery date and in between you see a rival, like Amazon is selling at cheaper price or has faster delivery date, there you can no longer cancel this present flipkart order and go elsewhere.
You can no longer place order for multiple items, like shoe and clothing under their big billion day or such sale event, and then later decide on what to keep and what to cancel.
But by far the biggest issue would be with the delivery agents falsely accusing customers about delivery refusal & then Flipkart forcing you to pay unjustified cancellation fee.
What about others?
This cancellation fee isn’t any new concept. Amazon & other large ecommerce players have this system and other fee like return fee, relisting fee and such in their Europe / North American markets. However, Amazon India has no such rules here in India and it is Flipkart which is first to implement this.
Although, as of writing this article, Amazon India has no such rule about cancellation fee but rest assured, if Flipkart is doing it, within a short time, Amazon India will follow this same route.
So be aware of this new “Cancellation Fee” system of Flipkart & be cautious about online shopping.