This guest post is written by Jai Anand, a 2^nd year student at Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat. All views are personal.

Let’s start this with a question. Have you ever bought a BlackBerry phone with an operator’s logo on it? A simple answer would had been no. But if you have bought one from our own e-commerce guys here in India, you might have seen an AT&T or Verizon logo printed on it. Why, let’s try and figure out.

There have been several complaints from customers who purchased Blackberry phones online. Common issues reported are:

• Phones received are co-branded with US mobile networks (like AT&T, Verizon)
• Phones are sometimes locked.
• These phones do not come with Blackberry India warranty of 18 months; rather they arrive possessing a “vendor warranty” of 6 months.
• When customers visit and complain at regular Blackberry service centers, they are not entertained on most occasions as their IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) numbers are not available in the systems of Reddington India, who runs the service centres of Blackberry India.

Why do consumers buy such phones?

No rocket science needed to understand this consumer behaviour. In a price sensitive country like India, consumers buy such phones because prices are often stashed upto 15-20% than the price of Blackberry India phones.

These heavy discounts lure the customers and many times, they buy such phones without knowing the terms and conditions of the purchase. They just click ‘buy now’ and end up buying without even knowing that the handset is imported and does not carry any Blackberry warranty.

The troubles then begin. Some of them may be:

1. The phone hangs;
2. The phone battery does not last;
3. The phone screen might develop a fault and many more.

Since the phone does not come with a Blackberry warranty, consumers have nowhere to go but to the vendor who on many occasions is not available for comment.

Being a law student myself I wrote emails to various e-commerce companies to figure out why they don’t mention the warranty clause etc. Replies though were anything but satisfactory.

Someone I know purchased a Blackberry Torch from Dealsandyou (a leading e-commerce company) after reading the terms and conditions. After purchasing he found that the phone was imported with operator’s logo on the phone. He complained about this and to his surprise he was sent another set of terms and condition which mentioned that the phones are imported. The two different T&Cs have been are given below:

 

Fine print received initially.

 

Fine print after issue was escalated

 

Did you gather the difference between the two? The company actually changed the fine print.

Here’s the current blackberry listing at Dealsandyou website.  

 

I then wrote an mail to Dealsandyou to inquire about whether they get it legally imported; if they do then do they provide documents of the same and whether these phones are legally unlocked?

The reply was shocking. It read and I quote ‘We would like to inform you that product that we send are the Brand new phones. You will receive an invoice along with your order. On the invoice you can find the name and the address of the vendor.

 

Since we have direct contact with the seller, we get discounted prices and all terms and conditions are clearly mentioned on the Fine Print.’

Anyway, not one to be discouraged so easily, I wrote back again but to my dismay received the same response.

Effect on Blackberry India

So how does the same affect the brand Blackberry? I was very inquisitive to know this and I asked Ankur, the founder at Akosha, how to best understand this. He offered to write to the Blackberry PR team. He asked:

a) Does Blackberry India know AT&T/Verizon locked phones are being sold by e-commerce companies?

b) Does Blackberry India approve of this practice? If not, why is it tolerating the same?

c) If it approves of this, then why it isn’t providing customers’ service through regular service centers?’

His email is reproduced here in full.

 

The response that came was quite disappointing. The Blackberry team said: “Customers have an option to purchase their favorite BlackBerry smartphone and choose an operator and tariff plan of their choice in over 80 cities and thousands of authorized retail outlet across India. We encourage our customers to purchase BlackBerry smartphones and accessories from authorized retail channels to ensure true BlackBerry product and services experience.”

Here is a screenshot of their email:

 

After this mail, Ankur sent the following follow-up email:

 

No reply came. The line went silent from Blackberry India’s end.

Important issues:

I have no issues even if the phone is imported but if a site claims it to be legally imported, a customer must be provided with the custom clearance and tax paid documents. Since these are not provided by any company/vendor, I am not so sure about the authenticity of the product.

Unlocking is another big issue and e-commerce companies should mention whether the phones are legally unlocked by the operator or are they third party unlocked phones.

For the information of the reader, no operator (including AT&T) allows unlocking of the phones through them before completing three months of active service. Thus, it now becomes impossible for these phones to be unlocked by the company as these are new phones (as mentioned by the e-commerce company). Hence the only case is that this is third party unlocking. Or the phones are used phones and being sold as new.

Why is this important?

In the end the ultimate loser is the consumer, who, for the sake of saving some money falls into the dirt and ends up buying something below par. These practices also hurt e-commerce reputation since a lot of people are paying for goods online for the first time.

The need of the day though is more transparency so that hard-earned money of the consumer does not end up being in dump. Blackberry India also needs to take a few steps because as more and more people buy cheap stuff, it is their reputation which will take a beating.

I write this in the spirit of a law student who is also a budding entrepreneur. I feel that as more Indians start buying online, we need to ensure that they don’t get burned by such experiences and never come back to shop online.

This guest post is written by Jai Anand, a 2^nd year student at Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat. All views are personal.