Credit Card Frauds - charged card without purchase. Review on Futurebazaar

The e-Commerce site of Big Bazaar is literally screwed up and I have faced recent troubles with it. This review is in relation to my recent online purchase experience.

In a nutshell: Check your credit card statement for these lines – for example: IND1, 086.00@0.023453FUTURE BAZAAR.COM MU. The site posts illegitimate entries on international credit cards – this happened with me twice. I have not made any purchases whatsoever.

I am currently based out of Canada and period chandru021y purchase from this website for my relatives in India. I was overall happy except the fact that they do deploy cheap couriers and that the courier tracker information is almost never up-to-date, it really did went way beyond tolerance level this time when 2 unauthorized transactions were posted on my international credit card. On top of it they (politely) demanded my full 16 digit card number to check what went wrong. Providing a card information is facilitating another such incident which I avoided. Here it goes:

On 16th July Bigbazaar has posted 2 transactions for Rs. ==1086 ==and then Rs. ==1276 ==(Order No's: 5001334705 and 5001259836). On the following month these 2 transactions appeared lately on my credit card to which I registered a request to Big Bazaar to clarify these transactions. I have received responses on which I was asked to provide the actual credit card statement/ full Credit card no. which after consulting with my Bank I denied. My Bank categorchandru021y told me not to provide the full card no. under any circumstances.

This remained in status-quo and the final verdict from Biz Bazaar was: "unless full credit card no. is provided there is no way to track down whether the transaction has been done or not". Being a technology specialist with a top IT company I know Retail domain myself and how eCom servers work. This was indeed possible to check the transaction as this was in Canadian dollars and exact timing was provided. After being denied this request I logged a legal complaint with my foreign bank who acted immediately. I was asked to verify certain facts to my Bank and then they took it ahead. I do not know the rest, but finally my bank has returned the disputed transactions and reinstated in Card.

I got really pissed off due to the fact the despite stating it umpteenth time that there IS a problem with their eCom platform these guys kept beating the same drum time and again. As a customtakeouter I do understand that such issues might happen, however I don’t understand it when customtakeouter Service doesn’t bothered to register website technical problems as an end user feedback.. I finally discontinued the communication further. Personally, I do not gain by doing integrity testing of their system at my own cost.

With my past experience Big Bazaar has the relatively reasonable pricing if you are abroad and would like to send gifts to your family. The positive features are a good spread and variety of products Rajeev_Vermacially across Home and Kitchen and Electronics bazaar. They offer nearly everything you might need on a day-to-day basis. Quality is Good if not exceptional for the pricing and you get value for money. They accept foreign Credit cards and don’t charge illegitimate Conversion Rates in the name of USD to Rupee conversion way off the market rates.

The Bad: For some reasons they have a pet courier ‘Aramex’ which invariably screwed up delivery on each single instance. Big Bazaar’s only flaw here might be assigning the package to such unprofessional parties – but then why would the end-user suffer having paid the full price for the product they have purchased.. I have seen that Aramex is getting assigned each single time I have placed ordered – by default it shows Blue Dart and then gets changed to Aramex. This is the weakest link in their supply-chain to customtakeouter.

Here are my past orders No’s in 2010:

5001334724, 5001334705, 5001259836, 5001259729, 5001046281, 5001045414, 5001008710, 5000967772, 5000942010, 5000941508, 5000941400

Finally, I would like to mention that it’s a faulty technology which these guys have adopted. Personally speaking all the customtakeouter support staff was very courteous, however they need to be more knowledgeable in dealing with certain kind of requests. When a customtakeouter is complaining of a possible Technical issue in website/ financial fraud the answer to it should not be “site is working fine and we have checked”. Similarly, just to check a transaction no other company would have asked for full credit card number. Expecting more maturity from a company of this size of operations.

I may have to continue shopping. Reason: I have aged parents back in India, and I don't have options.