[Long rant ahead]
Amazon India's chat customer service has usually, but not always, been helpful and easily reachable. That's really a great comfort when it's needed. On the other hand, I don't know if Flipkart even has something as prompt and useful. The rest of the players hide behind email addresses (no phone numbers) for customer support. If there's one thing competitors must learn, it's the value of putting customers first and providing them assistance as quickly, as conveniently (for the customer) and as efficiently as possible.

> He (Piacentini) and Agarwal tell me Bezos has given them wide freedom to run India without his intervention, accepting that it could take years for the billions of dollars in investment to show returns. “His solicitations are never, ‘When will we make money?’ ” Piacentini says. “It’s always, ‘Are we investing enough?’ ”

I don't know what to make of this. Maybe Amazon India is investing a lot in getting more sellers on board, in improving its warehouse and fulfillment operations, and marketing. But one area where it has been severely and pathetically lacking is in the "findability" of products and refinement of searches for what someone is looking for. I find it baffling, exhausting and extremely frustrating that Amazon India cannot even get "sort by price" correctly. If you know exactly what to search for, it's possible that you might find it. If not, prepare to wade through multiple pages because a "sort price - low to high" may have some lower priced items later on or on the second or third page. It's really shameful and unbelievably terrible that a company like Amazon cannot get this right! As an example on search refinement and filtering, you want to narrow searches only to hard drives that are 1TB and larger in size? Choose that option and find 500GB and other sizes also listed in the results. Wade through the list one again and waste your time. I have repeatedly provided feedback on these for the last few years, but have not seen any improvement at all. If anyone in Amazon.in is reading this or if Jeff Bezos bumps into this comment, you really need to get your act together seriously and hire some competent people who can get this done. You people don't seem dedicated to what Amazon claims it wants to achieve. Stop wasting our time and putting us off your site! Look at Newegg if you want to see how to get product search and filtering done better.

On to other players, my recent favorite is Paytm (paytm.com). It's also a market place. It does not have an Amazon India like customer service option (just an email address). Its product descriptions and details are glaringly inadequate in many cases. Its search and refinement options are close to Amazon India, sometimes better and sometimes worse. But where Paytm excels is in cashbacks on products. Unlike cashbacks from Amazon or Flipkart where you'd get a gift card to shop from the same site, Paytm cashback can be used for paying phone bills, paying cable bills, booking Uber cabs, buying bus tickets, and several other things from other merchants. Its digital wallet comes in handy to transfer money to or request money from other people instantaneously.

After Amazon, I think Paytm is the one to watch out for in the Indian space. It has deep pockets (all those cashbacks are really mind boggling) and will trounce others very soon. In my experience, Flipkart has always been the most expensive for products, and its push for the app only shopping part is highly immature and not thought out well at all. People who do compare prices across other sellers will migrate out of Flipkart. My experience with Snapdeal is very limited, but its somewhat similar to Paytm in lacking product descriptions and details. I've also read some horror stories about product delivery, fraud, etc., online (this didn't happen in my purchase experience with Snapdeal though).