Reviews – Page 55

Flipkart online bookstore review

photo credit: AnyhooI find it strange that I hardly ever talk about books on my blog, given that I read a lot. You’ll find many reviews of movies, albums and whatnot, but hardly any books. Odd, because I own an extensive book collection – I’ve totally lost track of how many books I have. I’ve donated many over the past few years, and I have quite a sizeable collection at some of my relatives’s place rather than at home. Then there are many many e-books that I have. I’ll try to remedy that over the next few months.

photo credit: Hi PandianI prefer buying books during the annual Delhi Book Fair or the biennial International Book Fair in Delhi, just because of the sheer variety of books that you can get. I rarely buy books from bookstores, that too if some new book comes out for which an e-book version is not available which I desperately want to read. I have no preferences among bookstores in particular; I don’t hunt around for deals, I just go to whichever bookstore is most convenient for me to go to at the time I feel like buying. Thus, given a choice, I would prefer to buy books online when these I-must-have-this-book urges spring up.

Till now, this has not been possible India. Shady websites being passed off as ‘online bookstores’ have been around but I know for a fact they aren’t reliable. Ordering from them simply wasn’t worth the trouble – it was far more easier to even trek across the whole city to get a book you wanted. The first people you need to avoid are the Snake Oil Merchants Inc trio of Indiatimes Shopping, Rediff Shopping, and Sify Shopping. As far as I know, these guys have no inventory of their own: local dealers sign up with them, the Snake Oil Merchants pretend they have the book, and pass on the order to one of these local dealers. How quickly you got your book and in what condition was decided by Snake Oil Merchants Inc by flipping a patented 10-sided coin they have, 9 sides of which say “Take the money and forget about ‘customer care'”. Friends of mine who were gullible enough to end up, say, pre-ordering a new Harry Potter release repented their decision when orders were left undelivered for weeks on end (the whole point of pre-ordering is defeated!).

Then there’s Indiaplaza and Futurebazaar. I think they got their websites by the same company, because both show similar and irritating errors. Start adding something to your shopping cart at any of these sites – and poof, in an instant your order choices will be lost because ‘we encountered an error’. Suffice to say that after such ‘errors’ I didn’t have the courage to try Russian-rouletting my way to their payment page.

Penguin India Book search — Penguin India could easily use Google Custom Search, but why stop making a mockery of its own customers?

Even more depressing are dedicated bookselling sites and publisher websites. Navigating Penguin India’s website is a terrifying experience requiring nothing less than a black belt in at least three different kinds of martial arts. Please, Penguin, designing is a website doesn’t mean you throw a few GIFs together like Lego blocks. Heck, try searching for books which books – I tried to find some books which I know have been published by Penguin India, and they didn’t turn up. Oh, it didn’t tell me right away of course. You have to try and trick the Penguin India website into thinking that you’re Chuck Norris, and if you fail to do that then it shows the error message above. Once you do succeed in fooling it (I roundhouse-kicked my laptop screen) it tells you that the book you know exists, doesn’t. Other Indian publisher websites aren’t worth talking about so I’ll give them a miss.

Among dedicated bookselling sites based out of India the most prominent ones are First & Second and A1Books. Both claim to India’s ‘largest’ / ‘number 1’ online bookstore, but till now I have been disappointed with their inventory. Many times when I’ve tried to search up books at these two places I came up with zilch results. Many times these guys claim to have books when they are in fact out of stock, but take your order anyway. Prateek was telling me today of how he faced such an issue with First & Second once where they took an order for an out-of-stock book and it took ages to get a refund.

I have been fairly apprehensive about buying books from online stores in India – until now. Lately I have been hearing a lot of word-of-mouth praise for Flipkart.com. So when Amit Varma’s book My Friend Sancho was released recently (review coming up soon!), I decided to give Flipkart a shot.

My rating of Flipkart: 8.2 / 10

The first thing that caught my eye about Flipkart was the no-nonsense attitude. There are no tall claims about being the largest / longest / biggest / highest / smelliest anything in India / world. They don’t keep pushing DVDs, flowers, box of chocolates, or any other crap like some other bookstores either. A list of bestsellers, search box – that’s it. Footer is a bit messed up, but it gets the job done. It seems that a lot of users keep asking them for free PDF ebooks…

You don’t pay for courier charges if the order value is above Rs 100 – which should be the case 9 times out of 10. Once you select the books you want, you can quickly create an account and proceed to checkout for payment. You have multiple choices for paying – credit card, debit card, Internet bank account, ItzCash card, cheque / demand draft. Credit card payment processing is done by Axis Bank’s payment gateway, which charges the lowest transaction fee out of any credit card processing gateway (I know because I do quite a lot of online transactions). Opting for cheque / DD obviously means you’ll have to snail mail it to them and then wait for your book – this option is mainly kept just for the heck of it on most e-commerce sites though I’m certain hardly anyone would be using it.

By far the most accessible option for everyone would be to use an ATM / debit card or an Internet banking account. These payments are handled by CCAvenue, the processing gateway that every effing startup in India seems to use. CCAvenue charges merchants a lower transaction fee so this is what most startups end up bootstrapping for payment processing. I hope CCAvenue dies a miserable death. Their servers can be unreliable and sometimes reject payments from legitimate cards, or simply time out while processing. To their credit however, CCAvenue never makes a wrong charge and even if the transaction fails due to a timeout error or something else, they send you an email informing you whether the transaction could be carried out or failed. You can then go back to the merchant site and place the order again safe in the knowledge that your card has not been charged.

Flipkart promises to deliver your order within three business days if the order is placed before noon on the day of the order. I placed my order for My Friend Sancho in the late evening yesterday, so I expected it to take at least two days to reach. I was pleasantly surprised when I found it had arrived early today morning! The packaging used is excellent – they shipped in a paperback-size cardboard box. The quality of packaging is good, no chance of the book getting damaged during transit.

Everything with Flipkart is almost-perfect – you can forgive them for the messed up front page navigation because their core strength is solid. What sucks really bad in Flipkart is its search feature. There is no ‘advanced search’ (none that I could find) which would allow you to search by title, author, publisher or ISBN to lookup a book. If you can find out from elsewhere online, ISBN is the fastest way to track down the exact copy and edition of whichever book you want. Right now, Flipkart’s search is simple text-string match. You can’t “enclose search terms in quotes” to search for exactly that phrase. Consequently it might take a long time to hunt down a book if the title or author name has common surnames / common phrases. Once you get a book, then you can easily look up other editions (hardback vs paperback) and compare prices. I also liked the fact that if a book is out of stock then it is clearly listed as such, with the option to set up an email alert to be triggered as soon as the book is available in their inventory again. I suggest that you use Yahoo! Search / Google Search to hunt down the book you want if it’s getting agonizing; restrict results to Flipkart by adding ‘site:flipkart.com’ before your search term in Yahoo! / Google.

I’ve found an online bookseller that I can trust, ships for free, delivers on schedule in proper packaging and even throws in discounts on books. They got it right by sticking to one thing – selling books – and doing that one thing extremely well. Flipkart might just have become my preferred method of buying books.

Komli ad network review

Regular visitors to my blog might have noticed that I have been tinkering a lot with ad placements / formats on my blog lately. The reason for this is that over the past few weeks I’ve been getting a large number of visitors on the posts I made on VIT and SRM. Traffic stats have turned into a frikkin’ vertical line. Monetization of this traffic is important to me for the future survival of my blog. While my hosting is done and paid for for the next three years, I do need to build a war-chest to pay for hosting beyond that. If traffic continues to grow at this rate – thank you, dear readers! – I would prefer to move to virtual dedicated / dedicated servers to provide a faster, better browsing experience when on my site for everyone.

Simple page loads do not make a big dent on the amount of data transferred. On my blog though, a significant – rather, major – chunk of data transfer is taken up by a) question paper / quiz archives; b) images. I can understand that a lot of people are giving entrance exams and thus the rush for exam papers, but I’m extremely delighted to note the enthusiastic response that my quiz archives generate. I never thought they would be so popular! Also, a lot of the images put up on my blog drive traffic through image search queries; I believe that is because each image I put up is meticulously named, alt-tagged and captioned – I suggest fellow bloggers to do the same and see the difference.

I’m happy with this success that has been made possible by you, my readers. 🙂 But the truth is that I need to think long term about the survival of this blog and to make this operation self-sustaining, ads are a necessity. Personally, I despise advertisements. It might sound ironic, but I don’t like ads. I suggest you guys to use AdBlock Plus to block out advertisments while browsing; use the EasyList filter when prompted to choose a filtering list after first install. But I’m also aware that my returning visitors – and possibly the tech-savvier ones – will be those who are using such plugins. I am 100% behind you guys when you take such a step, but if you don’t choose to use such plugins it’s OK. It’s the first-timer traffic mostly coming from search engines that I intend to monetize with ads. See, visitors referred to by search engines are searching for some information – which may or may not be available on my blog post. Many times they might be looking for commercial products / services, which an ad can direct them to. So it is this first-time traffic which is looking for something – or, let’s just admit it – dumb people using IE6 that I intend to monetize. (I’m not saying all IE users are dumb, but referring to the market segment which knows about nothing other than IE, and hi5 and scrap each other on Orkut in SMS lingo – and it’s a large market segment.)

I have been using Google AdSense for a long time and it has been highly successful, especially over the last few weeks. The drawback is that Google limits the number of ad units you can put on one page. This results in a lot of unutilized space, particularly in my sidebar. To fill up this real estate, I decide to hunt for a secondary ad network for my blog. AdSense does not allow any context-sensitive ad network to be used alongside it, so this has to be a non-targeted ad network, and preferably one which pays for impressions (CPM).

Since a majority of my traffic is from India, I started hunting for an Indian ad network. Most suck and / or don’t inspire the confidence in you that they have a good ad inventory (going by reviews other have put up). I narrowed down to three networks – Tyroo, AdChakra, and Komli. All three have manual approval process for new publishers, so you need to apply to them and then wait to be accepted in their ad network.

AdChakra sent me a PDF form to sign and send to them – with no indication of which address to send to. In one fell swoop, that was three strikes for them and I deleted their PDF form.

Tyroo rejected my application. Dunno why. Yahoo! India is has a significant stake in Tyroo.

Komli Ad Network review

My rating of Komli: 1.4 / 10

That left Komli. At first glance, Komli seem to be everything you ever wanted if you’re an Indian publisher. Komli is mainly targetted towards Indian users – but it also pays you for international traffic. You get paid for impressions, then extra if a user clicks on the ads you serve. My application was approved and I decided to put Komli ads in the unutilized space. They support standard ad formats which AdSense has which allows you to integrate them easily into spots previously filled by AdSense.

At first, it seemed that signing up for Komli was a good idea. Ads seemed to be somewhat interesting, considering that it was non-targetted – soft drink ads, IPL teams ads et al. Then I noticed that many times, Komli’s ads failed to load completely. Komli uses iframes to load it ads, which meant that when an ad did not load it left whitespace equivalent to ad format area wherever it did not load. That is obviously a less-than-ideal situation when you have ads which are not loading. I don’t know whether this is content delivery failure or whether did not have ads to fill in that space. If it was the latter, then they should have at least put in some placeholder so that it didn’t appear odd.

I introduced Komli ads on my blog around six days ago, so I decided to take stock today and see how well it performed. The statistics were dismal. According to Komli’s own analytics, it served approximately 13000 impressions on my blog over the past week. And for that, Komli is going to pay only 10 cents (around Rs 4.90)! They are paying 60% of revenue to publishers – that means what Komli gets to keep is even lower. This is what I get for those many impressions? Frankly, Komli isn’t worth it. Maybe advertisers aren’t paying them enough or whatever it is, signing up for Komli makes no sense for publishers. Now I see from other reviews on the Web that pretty much everyone else is saying the same thing.

I did get clicks on Komli ads, but merely clicks don’t seem to pay much. Remember that 10 cents is what they’re giving after factoring both CPM and CPC on my account. It seems that Komli – if it pays – pays for conversions. Basically, Komli ads might pay out only on a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) basis. The problem is that in India CPA ads don’t perform that well. If the required action is some kind of sale / purchase, then that’s not likely to happen in India since online shopping isn’t that big. For heaven’s sake, look up on how many people have credit cards, and even among those how many of them are comfortable to use it online. The other kind of action could be signing up at a website – now most these ads would happen to be from job sites or matrimonial sites. Problem with that latter is that these are so well-known because of their carpet-bombing of sites with ads, that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have a visitor who’s never heard of these sites and would therefore click on your banner ad to go and sign up there. In a nutshell – Komli won’t work.

I have switched to AdBrite now as my secondary ad network. No ads showing up yet, although it does tell publishers to wait for 24 hours before it can start displaying ads. I hope AdBrite performs better. I’m a bit apprehensive about AdBrite because it has been known earlier to serve borderline porn ads. AdBrite took care of AVN Ads network, but there was a tiff between AVN and AdBrite, with AVN ending their contract with AdBrite and launching Black Label Ads. So theoretically, nothing offensive should show up now. Naman has tried out AdBrite for a few days and he suggests that if you’re using AdBrite, set it to show ‘family-friendlist ads’. Even though the default option of ‘all ads’ says they won’t show adult ads, Naman said that AdBrite did show slightly risque (although not porn) ads once. In case you come across an AdBrite ad which you think is offensive, leave a comment here (with a screenshot, if possible) and I’ll look into it. I’m also experimenting with full-page interstitial ads which will only be triggered on the fifth pageload in a 24 hour period by any visitor – tell me if this is too obtrusive.