Tatacliq delivered a damaged TV and declined return

We were under the impression that installation/demo for a TV is not mandatory, but something that can be cancelled if the customer doesn’t want it. In fact, for the same TV, installation is optional on Amazon. Also we bought a very similar TV for our parents from Reliance digital for which we cancelled the installation and did it ourselves. We admit that we didn’t read all the emails from tatacliq line by line. We just assumed that they will be like Amazon from whom we never faced any trouble for processing returns. As you said, if you think from the seller side, they can suspect that the customer mishandled the TV. But how can an e-commerce portal be run without placing some amount of trust in customers? For example, what if it was an expensive product not requiring an installation, like a phone? Then if the customer finds it broken upon opening the package, then the seller can still suspect that the customer broke it, but he cannot use any hidden clause to shift the blame on to the customer. Or like you said, they will have to make it mandatory for all buyers to shoot videos of opening the package. Or the delivery person himself must open the package and shoot a video on front of the customer. But we believe there must be an element of trust in the customer. We informed tata Cliq within hours of delivery of the box that the product was broken. Even the seal of the packet containing the power cord has not been opened yet. You can imagine how carefully a customer who paid so much for a TV would handle it: with utmost care! Unless the customer is some psycho, there is no way he would handle it so carelessly as to break the screen. Ok, psychos exist, but e-commerce companies always run that small risk. Their business model should contain some kind of insurance that covers the extremely small number of careless customers. A much much higher probability is for the product to get damaged in transit, during which it is handled by people who have absolutely no investment in the product. For this eventuality, tata Cliq must surely be insured. But they choose to suspect the customer at the slightest possible opportunity. This is the kind of behaviour shown by those indian stores where they won’t take back something you have bought even one second after the bill is made. All of this aside, tata Cliq seems to have put ZERO effort in ensuring that every customer is aware of their anti-consumer return policy, which is different from that of other e-commerce portals. It is very easy to miss a line inside a long email or message unless the email is captioned with “IMPORTANT INFORMATION INSIDE” or something. There were so many ways, like writing on the box etc., by which they could have let us know that the box should not be opened. They chose not to do anything other than put a line inside a seemingly unimportant mail (what is the guarantee that the customer is actually even seeing these mails?).