marypcbuk | Entries tagged with ecommerce

Do you want to pay £5 in case you're clumsy?

We've been putting together a new server for Exchange 2010; the first try got us a machine that didn't do hardware virtualisation. (How can anyone sell a server that doesn't have hardware virtualisation support in this day and age?) Once we had a more capable system it was time to stock up on memory and storage and we turned to Crucial and Scan as usual.

Scan practically spammed me with notifications and receipts and invoices; I counted five mails from them within half an hour. Sadly, I didn't pore through the details of one of them carefully enough and it wasn't until I looked at the paper invoice that I found a £4.38 charge for insurance. Insurance? It can't be delivery insurance or just doesn't work insurance; the carrier and my credit card already take care of those. So what's it for? When I complained about it, Scan said "Scansure is 28 day damage cover, in the event that any of the components covered by this are damaged during installation. Further details can be found at http://www.scan.co.uk/Scansure/Index.aspx". So it's insurance against you being stupid enough to break the thing you bought when you fit it.

And how did it get on the order, when we're sure we ticked the box to say we didn't want it? And why isn't it opt out? (Isn't it a legal requirement for optional charges to be opt in rather than opt out?)

I mailed Scan back (after a few days the mail bounced saying the account was suspended; I resent it) and got a reply saying they'd tried to phone us and explaining why the insurance is there. "The whole idea behind this cover is to make it very cheap. It's designed to encourage people to build their own PCs, and has the additional benefit to us of simplifying the RMA process. Our research revealed that over 70 percent of RMAs happen within the first 28 days. It's hoped, that by taking the fear out of building a PC this will in turn boost the component market. This is a brand new product, that hasn't been seen anywhere else in the IT industry. Whilst we agree that the cover is added by default when initially checking out a basket of components. It is very easy to opt out by proceeding to the next page, and at 'Step 1' choosing to remove the additional fee from the order." Apparently, at some point we must have clicked back in the browser and this was enough to add the insurance back in again.

Scan can't refund the charge 'because the order has shipped' (again, I thought all insurance had to come with a cooling off period during which you could cancel). My politely worded complaint resulted in an offer of an equal discount against a future order - but that means I'd have to want to shop with them again. As far as I can see, this insurance is great for Scan - and if it was an optional, opt-in thing great for nervous upgraders; I don't see what it has any benefit for me and making it opt out is - as Google can tell you - just not good enough.

I want to complete my online purchase; I do not wish to sign up for your not even slightly more secure security programme for my credit card because I keep my credit card secure already, I don't want to give you my date of birth to lose, I don't want you to tell me I've already used a password when I've never signed this card up for your service before and I object to you dealing with the appallingly insecure practices of credit card merchants and banks by making my life more difficult. Get out of my way and fix your own security issues instead (how about you make chip and PIN secure or actually shut down vendors like Tesco and PC World who break the chip and PIN rules every day? no, you'd rather get in my way and give me another password to forget, have compromised or have you reset to something appallingly insecure like BANKING1 when you allow your banking site to be cloned because doing it right is much harder than annoying the shopper). And then, dear bank, you block my transaction as fraudulent...

All this from a Web site that delivers me an order confirmation on an https page that is full of content that doesn't come via https and some that shows up with a security certificate error, compromising the security of the page so much that my browser declines to show half of it. I'm going to find somewhere else to buy a server next time.

I'm not quite so much of a fan of State Farm bank any more. Yes, it still makes our American friends fall over laughing (you have a bank account with an insurance company!). Yes, it's still the only bank I've found with no $10 fee for incoming domestic wire transfer (which is why I'll stick with them). But they've just changed their terms and conditions and their online banking. Instead of unlimited ATM rebates, I'll only get $10 of rebates per statement cycle unless I have a deposit via an automated clearing house; I don't know if my wire transfers count as clearing house deposits and I often don't earn and spend in the same month - so I shall have to rely on cashback and friends ATM much more. And most annoyingly, the online site changed on November 10th - maybe for the better, maybe not. But among the things I would have had to do before November 6th was taking a record of transactions older than 60 days on the site (before I could go back to the opening of the account and see everything, so I copied information about once every six months when doing my expenses and taxes). As we didn't get to the US until the 7th or to our post box till Friday, that wasn't going to happen. But when it's about ebanking and you have my email, might it not be pretty 21st century to email me as well as writing to me?

All in all, State Farm goes down from 10/10 to 7/10 in my rating. Maybe lower once I work out what this 'minimum balance' thing is...

The first time, it was my fault; I got halfway through booking tickets for Ludovico Einaudi in October at the Barbian, couldn't remember my password, went to look it up and got distracted. Fill in the password, discover there are no tickets in my basket; OK, it timed out.
The second time, my card didn't go through (this happens one time in a few; I obviously need to phone MBNA pretending to be John Lewis and sort it out; I love getting the vouchers but I pretty much hate operating the John Lewis card because the experience is awful) and when I went to put in another credit card - there were no tickets in my basket again!
Also, no I don't want to save 25p by paying for my ice creams three months in advance. Maybe if you didn't put an extra screen in the booking process just to turn that down, it would be slightly less irritating to go through the booking three times.

But. Einaudi. Barbican. October 24. New work, yay!

I've just booked tickets for The Blue Nile at Somerset House on Sunday evening and it's the usual rip-off: on top of the £2.75 booking fee it costs £2.50 to print out the tickets - the same as having them posted to me, but I pay for the printing. And the ticket isn't the usual small ticket where you could fit two on one sheet of A4; it's padded out with adverts for Ticketmaster and the venue that I'm instructed not to skip printing, because I have to present the 'entire page' at the venue. The ticket is in colour; this can't be a counterfeit prevention measure because every printer will print it differently, so that raises the cost of printing from a mono page. It's the barcode that matters and that's on twice - fair enough, in case one gets creased. And there may be a good legal reason for putting the terms and conditions on there. But without the ads, you would still get two tickets on one sheet of paper - and singletons would still save on the ink.

Of course it's only one sheet of paper, and half a page of ink. But multiply that by 3,500 people at the gig, and then ten gigs in the series and hundreds of events a month. What a huge waste of resources.

I've just been shopping for a recording gadget to record conversations; it's a combines earpiece and microphone that you put in the ear that you hold the phone to, so it will work on mobile calls. I'm not sure how well it works but it's worth a try for £16. Except that the first site I try charges £8.50 postage, so I abandon my cart and look elsewhere. This is annoying as I've already had to register for an account, typing in my name, address, company name, phone number, business type yadda yadda yadda... My time, their processor cycles; both valuable.

The next site only charges £5 for postage, so I sign up for another account, find my credit card and fill in the details. But wait; this site didn't tell me in advance that they don't show the VAT in the price, so it's no saving after all. I abandon the cart halfway through the credit card validation; their card processor might or might not charge for that. Third site, another account. Postage is £5, there's no hidden VAT. I type in my credit card details again. They're not accepted, because the default is Visa Electron, not Visa and it was pre-selected, making it easy for me to forget to change it. They got the sale, but they burned more cycles on it than necessary; they may have done the initial card type/number algorithm check locally but they still had to serve another page. Do that to a thousand people a day and your CPU and hard drive and network and aircon are all working more than they'd have to if you designed things properly in the first place. And your customers are less satisfied and less likely to come back.

Not showing the postage cost before checkout is the number one reason for people abandoning a shopping cart online (in the real world I think it's because it's too much effort to push it back to the shop unless it has one of your shiny pound coins in). If you don't show me exactly how much you're going to charge, I'm not committed to buying; until I see the final price, I'm still browsing and your site is wasting my time.

A lot of people abandon sites that collect too much information up front. Why do you need an account for me; I might never come back and now you have my personal data clogging up your hard drive, imposing a duty of care on you to back it up and protect it from hackers. You can't spam me or sell me to an address list; you didn't ask for permission or I said no. Offer me the chance to save my details after you've delighted me with a friction-free shopping experience. Or if you insist on my address up front, use it to work out the shipping charges and show them to me.

Ludicrous postage and packing charges. I paid £8.50 postage on an eBay item, special delivery. The stamps on the parcel didn't come to £2.50 let alone £8.50. I've been charges $20 shipping on an $1 eBay auction. £8.50 for something that weighs 100g? Please. For that price I could get a travelcard to Tottenham Court Road, shop with one of your competitors, buy a latte and still have change. How much will I pay for convenience? Amazon has doubled the number of people who are willing to pay $79 a year not to pay any postage at all.

Is it in the basket? Is it really in the basket? Is it still in the basket? I had to go answer the phone. Your shopping cart isn't showing me what products I put in and I forgot. Give me a hand, show me what I'm doing.

Ecommerce; it's not rocket science but if you get it wrong, your sale goes bang.