How Mobikwik is making fool out of customers!

During festival seasons, all marketing people become too active to get hold of as many customers as possible. Due to undue sales pressure, many opt for tricks to fool customers into making a purchase. Here is one genius trick from Mobikwik marketing team to fool customers into making a purchase.

Typically while looking for online ticket booking, first thing you do is to look for a good deal so you ask google for best deal. Now for keyword "BUS BOOKING DISCOUNTS" Mobikwik google ad comes first as shown in below screenshot. It reads 500 supercash on bus fare with minimum booking amount of Rs.1000.

When user clicks on this ad, one reaches below screen which has no mention of the ad. On its entire screen information about supercash is nowhere to be found. Though ad shows landing page as www.mobikwik.com/Bus-Ticket/Offers actual landing page is different. When you try link directly into the browser it redirects to home page.

Now going through the actual booking (before final payment), it never explains what is supercash?

Now when you google for supercash at mobikwik, you get below info.

The marketing genius here trying to explain that supercash is better than normal cashback because you will be able to use 10% of it on every transaction except on recharge & bill payments where it is 5%. Moreover it says old cashback system did not allow usage of cashback if you have available balance which is a message to users that don't keep any money in mobikwik wallet if you want to use your cashback.

In simple words it is nothing less than a fraud. On top of it when you are doing the booking, you mostly forget to check on the cancellation policy. Interestingly, mobikwik has ensured that customer loses 10% of money while doing the booking. In cancellation refund it shows 90% refund when cancelled during in 2-3 days but here interestingly the starting time of cancellation in before your booking time itself. So in a way, mobikwik keeps 10% if user tries to cancel the ticket after feeling being cheated by the company.

Adding on to the fraud by the company is displaying of lesser cost on the listing pages while higher cost on inner pages of purchase. When you see lower cost on listing page lesser than other website for the same bus, you are bound to click on it but on the next page the cost is higher than the last page. Below is one sample,

One cant expect user to do so much research while trying to do a booking within 30-40 seconds. The marketing team at mobikwik might feel like they can get away with it but they have definitely screwed up valuable customer shopping experience.

Final nail in the coffin is the cancellation. While on the cancellation screen it showed deduction to be Rs.160 while actual deductions were 184 with no explanation whatsoever.

Now what can you do about such practices? Lets answer deception with deception. One simple way is keep clicking mobikwik google ads. Click through incognito mode of chrome to ad extra fun. This way with every click by the users on mobikwik google ads, it will cost the mobikwik company little extra money and addon to puzzle to their marketing genius team on why customers are not buying even after clicking the ad.

Now if the company is willing to do such frauds with the customers, god knows how they are actually cooking their books for the investors. Best luck to all the investors of Mobikwik!