About a year back, I wrote about how excited I was that Lazada was finally coming to Malaysian shores, however I never really got around to buying anything from Lazada until recently. As you know, I was in the market for a new Unifi router and after some online shopping I decided to settle for a Asus router from Lazada, not only was the price cheaper, Lazada promised free delivery and even an RM10 discount if I subscribed to the newsletter.
So I created and account, subscribed to the newsletter and purchase an Asus router from the website–thinking all I had to do was sit and wait, and the router would be at my doorstep within 3 days.
WRONG!
Payment under Review
At the end of making the purchase, Lazada sent me an email claiming my payment was ‘in review’. I’m not sure what that meant, but a quick call to my credit card company confirmed that the funds were already deducted from my card. To me this was unacceptable, but thinking it could be a problem with my card, I decided to try the purchase again but with my regular credit card this time–alas the router was already out of stock.
What I suspect happened was that my payment was successful BUT Lazada ran out of stock, hence placing the order under review. The wording of the email was poor, and the whole experience left me unimpressed.
2nd Attempt
After checking around on the lowyat forums and a few sellers, I noticed that the router I had was not in stock anyway in Malaysia. I guess it was discontinued, so I decided to upgrade to the next available router, one that was in stock.
This time I used my regular credit card (rather than my debit card) to make the purchase, and everything seem fine.
Soon I got a confirmation–but of course the confirmation was a bit wonky, check out below and see if you spot the mistake?
To be fair, this was due to the fact, that I bundled a few more accessories with the purchase, but the fact that Lazada couldn’t properly issue an invoice was a bit dis-concerting to say the least. These were people I was handing over my Credit Card information too.
The one thing I was happy with, was that they sms-ed me the tracking number, which I appreciated. It allowed me to easily track the parcel without having to open up my emails.
Delivery
This is where things got really ugly.
Lazada claimed they shipped it out on Jul-31, and based on my experience with courier services, I usually receive it one day later. However, that wasn’t the case. Lazada uses GDex as their courier partner, and the guys over at GDex did a poor job at communicating their delivery times.
Logging onto the tracking website on the 01-August revealed, GDex only collected the items on the 1st. Meaning Lazada hadn’t actually shipped out the items till one day after they informed me.
The next day, I logged on to find out that the item was “Out for delivery”, which I understood to be “On the way to my house”. However, even after waiting the whole day–I received nothing.
The next day, I logged on again to find the item was AGAIN “Out for delivery”, but being wiser this time, I called GDex to ensure they were indeed coming, and they informed me that they would be at my house before 12.
Alas, 12 o’ clock arrived and no delivery was in sight. Calling GDex again, and they informed me the driver would be there in 15 minutes–he took nearly one hour to arrive. Now of course 1 hour isn’t a lot, but I was in a rush to leave the house, and the whole experience left me frustrated.
This isn’t Lazada’s problem, a similar package from another online retailer that was shipped on the 31st of July, took 4 days to reach me. The conclusion is that if Lazada truly cared about their customer experience, they would switch their courier, because Gdex basically sucks.
To put things in perspective, I ordered a fitbit from Amazon, and they shipped in from Allentown, USA to Malaysia in 3 days (one the week of Christmas)! So there is no excuse for GDex take 3 days to ship something locally.
Conclusion
Lazada did provide some good prices, but the experience left me wondering if the Rm10-20 savings was worth my frustration. Have you had similar issues with Lazada, share it in the comments below, I’d love to hear them.