The first wave of PlayStation 5 pre-orders in India is now over and it has, as expected by many, left a sour taste. While big e-commerce companies such as Amazon were cluttered with scalpers that emptied the stocks in mere seconds, small retail services such as Reliance Digital gambled far worse, taking more pre-orders then it could afford, robbing many customers ( who only had limited savings) out of options to try getting a PS5 from someplace else, and worse, not informing them about these shady occurrences.
There’s one thing to build up expectations, shatter it and then apologize, it’s a completely different thing to ignore the matter altogether and Reliance Digital seems to be doing exactly that.
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For starters, it never sent a confirmatory mail to everyone who managed to place a pre-order for the PS5 or at least carried an illusion that they had, shoving their hard-earned savings to an utterly unreliable retailer. Second, its customer care service gave many a false hope that one’s order has been confirmed and the non-availability of confirmatory email is a “system glitch,” one that they would receive soon.
Third, the confirmatory email did arrive hours later, filled with statements such as, “your order has been placed and is now being processed,” giving yet another false hope to its customers, the one that it would quietly be breaking a few hours down the line.
Fourth and the worst, they cancelled the pre-order without sending any emails yet again and with no immediate refunds. Many customers wouldn’t have even found out that their orders have been cancelled if they weren’t checking Reliance Digital’s official website every so often.
It's official: looks like Reliance Digital cancelled a majority of their orders. Not only is the below survey based on a good sample size, quite a few people who answered in the morning had their orders cancelled later. pic.twitter.com/Urq1AIKfhh
— Is PS5 Out in India Yet? (@PS5India) January 13, 2021
A Twitter account, that has been religiously tracking the release of PS5 in India, recently did a survey for the people who pre-ordered the PS5 via Reliance Digital, online or offline. According to it, 51.5% of the people got their pre-orders cancelled while 48.55% of the people still had it confirmed.
However, as seen in the comments, a few people who voted as “confirmed” got their orders cancelled, later on, implying that the cancelled percentage, at the time of this writing, is more than what’s being displayed. If this survey is any indication, Reliance Digital, at the moment, is carrying a sum of over INR 80,000,000, something it has absolutely no right to.
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What’s even horrendous is that this isn’t the first time this retail giant has pulled off such an inexplicable, downright shameful move. People who pre-ordered Xbox Series X way back in September 2020, would recall experiencing something similar. As IVG reported, Reliance Digital called a bunch of its customers about a possible delay in the delivery of Xbox Series X.
This was supposedly due to the lack of knowledge about the stock. As it seems, Reliance Digital hasn’t learned its lessons, not that it deserved a second chance in the first place, but the PS5 pre-orders fiasco should open its customer’s eyes. As if it wasn’t obvious, Reliance Digital is impotent, incapable of taking mass pre-orders, and can’t be trusted with such activities in the future.
