Until roughly 2018, e-commerce post-purchase in India meant Flipkart and Amazon — two apps, two return windows, two refund SLAs. By 2026, the average urban Indian buyer transacts with quick-commerce (Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart), fashion verticals (Myntra, Ajio), beauty (Nykaa, Tira), grocery (BigBasket, JioMart), pharmacy (Tata 1mg, PharmEasy), electronics (Croma, Reliance Digital, brand D2C), and at least two general-purpose marketplaces — alongside dozens of smaller D2C brands that fulfil through Shiprocket, Delhivery, Xpressbees or Ekart.
Each of these surfaces a status, a return policy and a refund SLA in a different format, on a different page, behind a different login. The shopper's mental model — "has my stuff arrived; can I send it back; where's my money" — does not factor by merchant. Their data does. The gap between those two facts is the category.
Every post-purchase question collapses to one of four. We treat each as a separate sub-problem because the data sources, regulators and merchant policies behind them differ.
Resolved by stitching the merchant's order ID to the courier's AWB and the courier's state machine (out-for-delivery, attempt-failed, RTO, delivered). Both IDs are in your email. No single courier-tracking site covers all merchants and no single merchant covers all couriers.
The Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 require sellers to display return terms before sale, but the rules do not standardise the windows. Apparel typically gets 7–30 days; large appliances get 7–10 days under brand-installation conditions; grocery and beauty are commonly non-returnable. We maintain a per-merchant catalogue.
Refund SLA depends on payment method and on whether the merchant has "initiated" the refund — an internal step that can lag pickup by days. UPI typically lands in 1–3 working days, prepaid card in 5–7, COD-to-bank in 7–14. The Reserve Bank of India's framework for failed-transaction reversals sets the regulatory floor.
Warranty in India is a brand-level promise, not a merchant-level one. Once the box leaves the merchant, you deal with the brand directly — usually with the order invoice as proof of purchase. Duration, scope and claim channel vary by brand and product line. We track them per brand.
Tracking apps that ask you to type AWBs are not intelligence — they are a thinner UI on top of the same problem. A real intelligence layer (a) ingests the events automatically, (b) reconciles them across the merchant↔courier↔bank graph into one timeline per purchase, and (c) acts on the timeline — flagging a missed pickup, surfacing a refund that did not arrive, reminding you that your warranty expires next week.
The data is already in your inbox. Order confirmation, shipping update, delivery confirmation, return-pickup acknowledgement, refund-credit notification, warranty registration. The job of post-purchase intelligence is to read that stream, normalise it, and answer questions you would otherwise have to ask seven different apps.
Zlash One reads e-commerce mail in your Gmail inbox, parses every order, return and refund, and renders one chronological timeline per purchase across every Indian merchant. No AWB typing, no merchant logins, no per-app tracking — one feed, one search, one source of truth.
See how Zlash One works →Why no single courier-tracking site covers your inbox, and what a merchant-agnostic tracker actually does.
The regulatory framework, the per-category pattern (apparel, electronics, beauty, grocery), and the routine exceptions.
The payment-method matrix, the merchant-initiated clock, and where the RBI TAT framework actually applies.
Merchant grievance officer → National Consumer Helpline (1915) → e-Daakhil consumer commission → RBI ombudsman for payment-rail issues.
What the RBI 2019 circular actually covers, the ₹100/day compensation schedule, and what falls outside it.
Brand vs merchant responsibility, the four anchors of a claimable warranty, and the registration window trap.
Consumer Affairs Ministry position, the proofs that work, the escalation chain when a brand refuses.
The no-returns default, the in-app refund flow, and the 10-minute exchange experiments rolling out across non-grocery categories.