“The books store at your door!”

I generally would buy books at local stores like Odyssey, Galgotia, etc. They have a far-from-extensive catalog – at least the branches close to my home. The books I want to read are not always best-sellers and it is difficult find some of such books at these stores. Annual Delhi Book Fair or the biennial International Book Fair in Delhi are very good places to buy books. But when you want to read something, you cant wait an year/two – can you? Obviously, Amazon has an extensive catalog and I always found any title I was looking for here. However, Shipping books to India from Amazon (from US based vendors) is expensive. We do have some big online stores that are based in India – the ones like indiatimes shopping and rediff shopping. Steer clear of these! First off, navigating these sites is a pain. I can take the pain (for lack of an alternate) if I knew, I’ll get my book. From my experience, that is only a wishful possibility. These guys take the payment even when they don’t have the book and getting a refund is a nightmare!

When I desperately want a book not available at the local book stores, I begin looking for people I know who would be traveling from US to India soon and see if they are kind enough to carry my shipment from Amazon – which is the only option unless you are willing to pay for the international shipment.

Recently, I heard about this website – and tried it. I am happy, it is reliable and cost-effective. In the last couple of months, I got 8 books shipped (6 local + 2 imported) and each one of them arrived in the promised time and in a very good condition in a rain-proof packing inside a thick cardboard box. I got most of these books at better prices than those at the local bookstores! They don’t charge for shipping if your book costs more than 100 rupees which means – almost always! They have an extensive catalog and ship these books themselves as opposed to asking third-party merchants (who actually have books) to ship them.

There are some minor things flipkart needs to set right though. You can search for books using their ISBN, Name, Author, etc – if you know what you are looking for. But if you do not know what you are looking for and are browsing books by genre – it is a bad experience. Primarily because, the classification is not very good and then the UI is bad too. Moreover, they don’t seem to have tag-metadata on books to make their search better. For instance, search for “world-war fiction” or “romance” and you’ll get books with those words in the title though that is clearly not what you are looking for.

Despite the minor issues, I’m pleased with the service at flipkart!