Bhubaneswar IT Entrepreneur Orders iPhone, Gets Soaps Instead

Bhubaneswar: An IT entrepreneur from Bhubaneswar was in for a shock when he opened the packet delivered from Flipkart on Thursday.

Chandra Shekhar Chitrala had ordered an iPhone 12 Mini on the e-commerce platform on Wednesday. He found a Rin soap and a part of a Vim bar cake instead of the iPhone worth over Rs 50,000

“I ordered an iPhone 12 Mini on Flipkart yesterday as they were having a sale. The outer packaging was not tampered with but on opening the box, I found two soaps. I assume the sizes were carefully calculated to match the weight of the phone,” he told Odisha Bytes.

He then contacted Flipkart support. “I had to repeat the problem to three separate executives before being informed that a return and refund was being initiated,” he said.

“While they have a number of stock phrases that are repeated, they appear to not take any responsibility for even the refund is dependent upon it being accepted by the seller – something that has still not happened,” he added.

In October, a Flipkart customer from Chandigarh, Simranpal Singh, found two bars of Nirma soap inside instead of an iPhone 12 128 GB variant, which he had ordered on its Big Billion Days sale.

The company spokesperson had then told TNIE, “Flipkart observes a zero-tolerance policy on incidents that impact customer trust. When the incident was brought to our attention by the customer at the time of the open box delivery, our Support Team reached out immediately to verify the details and a full refund was initiated. Our team has been in touch with the customer since the incident happened and are currently investigating the matter internally.”

Similarly, a man in Kerala, who ordered an iPhone on Amazon, had found a bar of soap and a Rs 5 coin instead. An engineering student in Paravoor in Ernakulam district placed an order online for a laptop worth nearly Rs. 1.25 lakh in September and received newspaper balls instead.