Insider Marketing: Ramblings of an Online Marketing Maverick

December 18, 2007

How Merchants Continue to Fail Online: an example

Filed under: Comparison Shopping Engines — surgesilk @ 11:29 am
Tags: ,

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I purchased  “A Charlie Brown Christmas” on Amazon Merchant yesterday. I found it cheaper elsewhere (but not much) but the seller included the info that if I purchased before 6pm PST, it would be shipping directly from the Seattle airport (the seller’s id oddly enough is iowabooksetc.com). Today I received an email confirming its shipping and a link to its tracking info. The above ‘info’ is what the link displays. I would say that it’s worth than getting no additional info.  A few of the problems:

* No product info

* No estimated delivery date

* No current status, where the hell is  location 97217? I suspect that’s a zipcode, but why should I have to look that up.

This leads to a bad customer experience, even if I get the product promptly, and in turn this seller will get bad feedback, lower sales, andpoorer conversions. Sometimes providing incomplete info is worse than providing no info.

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