Insane India :: Insanities from our land…

This is an original mail from an actual client of the IndiaMart company!

ATTENTION: ALL MEMBERS OF INDIAMART.

Dear Sirs,

We take this opportunity to bring to your kind notice the fraudulent business practice by India’s premier web design and promotion company INDIAMART INTERMESH LTD” through whom you have also developed and promoted a site like us.

We have been cheated by them in the design and promotion of an online trading site by them in the name of Pacificaa India International at a cost Rs. 1,22,500/-. They secured the order from us by saying that they will promote our website in all 250 major search engines of the world with top position. It took them more than one and a half years to design the site and they took the money by just promoting it in just five search engines whereas their executives while negotiating the order say it will be more than 250 search engines. We have been asking them from time and again for the details of the search engines where they have promoted our site but they provided us the names of five search engines only after one and a half years of hosting the site.

As you are aware that any contract for any work stands completed when the contractor satisfies his client that the work has been done as per the contract. Here, India mart, Instead of providing the list of search engines for us to verify if the promotion has been done in all the 250 search Engines as committed by them, they started demanding a renewal fee of Rs. 28,000 without caring our right to know the details of the Design and promotion of the site for which we have paid them huge amount. We wonder how they can demand the renewal fees when the Design and promotion of the site itself is incomplete. When we categorically told them that they are not providing us the details of promotion because they have not done it except in the five search engines, they suddenly deactivated our site causing us heavy monetary damage by way of investments and infrastructure we made for the online trading on the basis of the said online trading site, designed and deactivated by them including the huge amount paid to them.

We know, like us, many aspiring new and existing business people are being cheated by India mart by claiming themselves as India%12s Top web promoters and offering top ten positions in major search engines. They know that many people do not go for verifying if their site is promoted as committed by them.

We hope you will also check up your website designed by them to see if they have really done the promotion as committed to you while taking the order for designing.

As you know “Top position in 250 Search Engines” means hundreds of people visit the site and there will be an assured business. If you are not getting this it means they have not promoted your site as told at the time of taking the contract for designing and promoting your site.

We should united fight against this fraudulent business practice by raising this issue before the National Consumer Disputes Redressed Commission and also make representations before the Ministry of Information and Technology which is inviting suggestions for amending the IT regulations in the country.

Looking forward for your co-operation,

With best regards,

D. Venu Gopalan
Pacific India International
2151/3D, New Patel Nagar,
Opp. Shadipur Depot,
New Delhi 110 008.
Phone: 25706762 & 25891045

Here is my own personal opinion on the topic which I posted quite sometime ago…

IndiaMart is Evil

I have heard a lot about IndiaMart. I heard they do good work for you. They bring in good business for their clients. They charge pretty decent amount of money for a complete package of web design, development, optimization, and marketing. And surprisingly they get their clients genuine queries within weeks of the website going online.

This is not exactly a surprise. They are online since I believe 7 years, which is a lot considering Indian market. They are top for almost every Indian business related query on Google. So, it’s pretty expected that any export query from a foreign business client finds them to be a good option. So they have clients ready for almost any possible business line. This is where they hit individual search engine optimization people (like me and many other developers I know) very hard. They take all the top spots, leaving little for us.

It is not that they do great work with your site! I have a friend who got them to do his website. The website looked decent. But only on Internet Explorer! The site broke on alternative browsers. He got that fixed. No big deal. But after 6 months, I am yet to see his site do any good. All the incoming links he got are from me! His site does not even come tops on Google for his own firm name. Instead we get a generalized IndiaMart page. Here comes the brilliant logic of IndiaMart and every other business trading site. They make sites for you, but promote you on their sites. So, you pay them, give them traffic and advertisement from your site and get business queries in return. Impressive but awful considering they are not promoting you on the web. You get business as long as you pay them to be on their sites. But your site is nowhere in the picture. This is where individual web developers excel. They cannot generate business for you, but they make sure you are visible if someone searches for you or your related business. Not so delightful in short term but good for long term. You retain your identity on the web, get business directly. But there is always a risk in falling for fake business clients, or even worse no clients.

This makes our job to impress a client about our work over IndiaMart’s a lot harder.