Browsing by Subject "kuluttajavalitukset"

E-commerce is constantly growing. Possibilities to shop via internet has been growing as technology has developed. At the same time consumers are facing more and more problems and the number of consumer complaints have increased. This master´s thesis studies the problems consumers experience in e-commerce by analyzing the situations in which consumers feel they have been mistreated. The data used in this thesis consists of 186 written complaints sent by consumers to the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority. These have not been collected specifically for this study and therefore the data can be referred as real or natural. Consumers wishing to report or complain about specific trader have entered their stories through an electronic form. The data has been outlined and all the cases are just about e-commerce. The consumers’ written complains have been analyzed by using qualitative methods and organized in different main themes and types. This master´s thesis does not take into consideration any legal aspects of the stories used. The two main themes in this study are customer service and internet site problems. Consumers feel that contacting with customer service is challenging and even finding the contact information is difficult. Customer service does not contact directly the consumer when promised and the consumers need to take an active role themselves to deal with the problem. Consumers experience that companies are not interested in their issues and are lacking hugely in service attitude. The second theme on internet sites indicate that websites give wrong and misleading information to consumers. Information about product price or terms of agreement are not shown to the consumers. Product or service do not match consumers’ expectations formed from visiting websites. Also one of the main experienced problems is that consumers have trouble in buying the products mentioned to be on sale in internet. In those situations the problem is more in technical limitations of the websites and in the lack of information what coming from scheduled product sales time. If consumers do not have an opportunity to act face to face with customer service this limits established interaction. In this data consumers describe that they feel they have been cheated, betrayed and misled. Companies treat consumers more as a subordinates instead of a king.