Souq.com Experiences

Souq.com is quite an interesting website. It is probably the first online shopping website that was offered in UAE and have been around since ages. Their business model has changed over the past and has been restructured a lot over the years. Previously their only offering was from other users that created accounts and listed their own items used/new and sold to other users in which souq.com took a commission of 5% from the seller. After several years they have changed and started offering their own products and started their own sections with Deal of the Day, Warehouse clearance, Eid specials, etc.

Souq.com generally offers a wide variety of products from electronic gadgets to fashion accessories to games and much more. Their offers still include souq.com direct sales and sales from other souq members. Here is where you have to beware. Direct offers from souq are always genuine and authentic, but they are not always the item you might be looking for. For most of you that might be aware that Dubai has a large whole sale trading market for a lot of items mainly located in Deira, Bur Dubai and a few other areas. These wholesale traders normally deal in the parallel import and export of certain items. Lets say mobile phones for example, Samsung has an exclusive authorized distributor in the UAE being Eros Electricals, therefore all Samsung phones purchased from authorized sellers have warranty from Eros. But these parallel imports usually come from Hong Kong, Singapore and UK. Therefore they don't have Eros warranty. Now I assume souq.com has a tie up with some of these wholesale traders for certain products and souq does offer warranty on them, but beware its a Souq.com warranty and not an Eros warranty. The same applies to Apple, Sony and all other brands. Therefore all your claims go to souq so please buy at your own risk. Although if your happy with the price and don't care much about warranty then its not a bad deal at all. Specially considering they offer payment plans from certain banks and returns within 3 days of purchasing any item, which is a very good feature. They will accept any return hassle free and provide you with a refund no questions asked.

On the other hand, they have tonnes of other sellers to beware of. These are regular sellers like you or me that want to get rid of their personal used stuff or unwanted gifts. Again souq charges a 5% fee to sellers once the sale has gone through. If you are comfortable with buying such items, you can go ahead and do so as the same policy from souq applies on these sellers as well where you can get a refund of an item if you request a return within 3 days of receiving it. The risky part with dealing with these sellers is the probability of receiving counterfeits or fakes from them.
Through personal experiences I can say that a lot of sellers either display their used products as new or sell fakes at good prices and try to convince buyers with good deals. Its the same as dealing with websites like Alibaba or other Chinese replica websites, but atleast most of them mention the word 'replica' or look alike or are priced really cheap for it to be true unlike sellers on souq.com.

Generally just beware of some unimaginable deals where your jaw drops and you get carried away in emotion thinking that you got a deal too good to be true, because quite likely it just might be that way.
All in all souq.com has a really good buyer protection so you needn't worry about it and expect a full refund if something goes wrong in your purchase.
I can post a few links to some of these fakes I've come across in the past and answer any of your questions for the future if you have any. 

Namshi Experiences

I have had a few experiences with this website and in all honesty they started off very good after taking a major downhill turn for the worst.

Lets start with the products they offer, they mainly specialize in apparel and accessories from shoes to jewelry and other stuff. They have a large sports apparel section and a good number of major brands they offer. On the other hand there are some brands that very few people would know of or even some where no one would have ever heard of, I assume they are their home brands which they promote for better margins.

Their terms and conditions are basically the regular, but the kicker is they do not provide 'refunds' and they only provide exchanges. So if you ever purchase anything with them that you don't like or isn't the correct size, you will have to stick around with a return voucher they issue which you can use for 3 months or so.

On their products, I have to say are genuine and I haven't come across any counterfeit or fake items yet. But considering their pricing, which is not that different from store prices, its fair to say that they don't provide any unbelievable deals.

Now a majority of their offerings include Nike, Adidas and Puma. I would advice people to refrain from buying any of these items due to a lot of reasons. Firstly, all of their offerings are directly available at Nike stores or Sun and Sand sports stores across the region and the prices are more or less the same. The draw back though is that they stock limited sizes and they run out quite soon to which I assume they don't stock a good quantity in all sizes. Secondly, there are a few items they put up on 'SALE', these items are generally those that are from a previous collection or out dated in some sense. Most of these products they offer are available at the outlet stores of Adidas and Sun and Sands at a much CHEAPER price than the website. For example you can see them selling a lot of FC Barcelona jerseys, Real Madrid jerseys, Inter Milan merchandise and others at the moment on their website and they all range from anywhere between AED 140 - 350, the same merchandise is being sold in outlet stores at a price range of AED 69 - 150.

One of the worse experiences I have had with them recently was when I purchased a couple of items through them and had to return them. Now the return procedure is such where you request for it and the courier comes to collect those items, after that you have to request for the voucher again which takes 24-48 hours to generate. All in all this process should take 3-5 working days tops, but recently when I requested for the same, it took them nearly 12 days to collect the item from me and that too after 4 times of placing a request, generally I would not bother much but I needed them to issue me the voucher since I wanted to buy something else on their website which was running out of stock. Despite several requests for them to block an item for me and help me complete the return procedure faster, all went down the drain. They keep repeating a monotonous from the text book phrase such as, 'Our company policy does not allow us to block items for users, and our company can not issue a voucher unless the courier collects the items and blah blah..'
So eventually after my return was processed and voucher ready which took about 15 days or so, the item that I wanted to buy had obviously been out of stock by then. So after repeated emails and phone conversations I was told that I will have to buy something else or use the voucher later since they couldn't help me out in this matter. Obviously I requested for a refund repeatedly but I was denied all of those times. Some of their email replies really seemed like they were written by a robot that only wrote a couple of lines he was programmed to do so.
Now I am stuck with their return voucher with nothing I wish to buy from their website.
I still have all of their emails on record if anyone requires a look at them.
All in all I WOULDN'T recommend this website to anyone at all and probably never use it myself.

Online Shopping in UAE/Middle East

Hello everyone!

So this is the first blog of my life and I'm not much of a writer so pardon some of my approaches here. Basically I'm creating this blog to review and share comments on online shopping experiences mainly in the Middle East or even other countries.

Lets start with Dubai based websites, I'm sure you all are aware of sites like Souq.com, Namshi.com, Awok.com, Sukar, etc. so on and so forth. Now Dubai is fairly still fresh when it comes to online shopping and not a lot of people indulge in it due to some beliefs as the products might not be genuine or might be used of sorts. Whatever the reason may be, there is always that group of people that prefers buying their items from the mall or other shops.

 Most of you must have received loads of emails from various websites and get tempted to check out the whopping discounts they offer. How are they able to do so? How do they sell something at more than 50% off? I will explain that in further posts. I will also try to explain how most of these sites operate and how their profits are generated and how you can benefit from some of these scenarios,

My personal experience with all these websites has had its ups and downs, and to be honest I wanted to start this blog to bash a particular website, but I would rather let all you people decide instead after sharing some experiences.