What it takes to buy a .in domain and other stories

I've been trying to buy a .in domain for about five days now with little success. First the provider's (hostindia.net) servers were down, so every attempt to create an account with them would produce a ton of SQL error trace. I gave up after a couple of tries.
I was pleasantly surprised to get a (very polite) call the next day from someone at HostIndia apologising for the downtime and asking me to please try again - and this kind of customer care goes a long way with me.
So I tried again. I was able to order a domain, but when I got to the ICICI bank credit card gateway, it produced a bill for Rs.1398/-, twice the due amount. Turns out that HostIndia's billing system was duplicating orders, putting in two copies of every item on the bill.
Trusting in the fact that the customer care I'd already experienced wasn't a blip, I sent off a mail with a copy of the order. They got back to me immediately apologising again, saying that they'd removed the duplicate order from my account and I could now log in and pay up the 699/- that the domain costs.
So I login and get to the gateway just fine, make enter my info and hit 'submit' - and all I get is

RespCode=2&Message=Required+parameter+missing

from this url: https://payseal.icicibank.com/mpi/Moto.jsp

So there's no way I'm trying that last bit again. And am I following up with ICICI customer care this time? Probably not. I am going to be royally pissed if the transaction doesn't go through but I get billed for it. At the moment I'm quite happy if I don't get my domain - it just isn't worth the effort.

There's a trend here that I'm seeing more and more of late - decent companies (others I know have used HostIndia too) are getting bitten because the apps they use just aren't up to the mark. Some of them try to make up for this with amazing customer care - HostIndia is one example, TimesJobs is another. I'd signed up at TimesJobs quite some time ago, and though my profile clearly says 1.5 years of experience, I started getting mails for jobs requiring 5 years and up of experience. When I checked the site, sure enough, it showed my experience as being 5 years. A mail to customer care changed the number back to 1.5 - but failed to stop the mails. Another mail to customer care had no effect.
Tired of being spammed, I started looking for an 'un-register' option on the website. Not finding one, I just went ahead and disabled 'alerts' (as they are called). No result.
Next I removed all my contact information from my profile, including e-mail id. Still no result.
It took something like four (non-local) phone calls and five emails to get this fixed. The strange thing was, support seemed as bewildered about the whole thing as I was because all their systems told them my account was disabled.
I have a feeling that many of the companies in India, from the biggest to the smallest are getting taken for a ride when they get bespoke software built for them.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I bought mine using name.com. Was a relatively simple process, and didn't take more than 10 minutes, including setting up accounts and everything.

Unknown said...

Lucky you :)