Disorderly Conduct
I can’t tell you how long I’ve been buying stuff online (in what we’ll soon see is an ironic twist, Amazon’s order history page isn’t working right now) but it’s been many, many years. I’ve watched as online retailers who get it, like Amazon, have innovated, making the shopping experience smooth and worry-free.
Sadly, too few sellers “get it.” Just within the last week, I’ve been required to jump through unnecessary hoops to give companies my money. Moments ago, for example, I did what I should have done ages ago and bought a UPS so I could keep the bajillions of Firefox tabs I always tend to lose when the power flickers (as it’s done twice this weekend.)
The vendor asked for my credit card number with “no dashes or spaces.” Let me tell you a little something: it takes one line of code to strip out non-numeric characters from a sequence, and it’s something sellers should be doing anyway for security purposes. So why make it more difficult for me to ensure I’ve entered the right characters?
This site also had another of my pet peeves: the foreboding “click only once” or you might get charged twice message (in red, no less.) Again, it’s trivial to do a quick duplicate check. After all, when does anyone ever intentionally make a duplicate order in the space of a few seconds? Bingo: never. (Amazon goes one step further: they’ll even warn you if an item you’re buying appears anywhere in your purchase history, so you don’t inadvertently buy the same CD twice.)
To add insult to injury, the order confirmation e-mail from this site includes this:
Please remember that the advertised price does not constitute an offer to sell. The order confirmation does not signify our acceptance of your order, nor does it constitute confirmation of our offer to sell.
That’s right, the order confirmation is not a confirmation of my order. Super!
Slightly less annoying is the “cram the e-mail with junk” approach, which another (major) vendor took last weekend. In a message sent from ‘USPREPAID‘, I was told that “If you have already paid for your purchase, please retain [the e-mail]…” but “[i]f you need to send payment…” be sure to reference the invoice number. Is it too much to ask that a system smart enough to send me a message from the pre-paid confirmation system doesn’t waste my time with details about where to send a check?
All this sort of thing reminds me of the fuel pump I used the other day. I rolled up, got out, and saw the pump had a massive sticker: PRE-PAY ONLY. So I removed my card and scanned the menu, which offered two buttons: pre-pay… or pay inside.