I was never a big fan of online shopping. I am not impressed with the convenience and flexibility that it offers. I believe that people who take advantage of this are simply too lazy or too languid to move-or maybe they’re just too busy. I don’t care. It’s their life anyway.
But mainly reason why i hate shopping online is because it increases the possibility that I will be a victim of identity theft. I’ve heard a lot about identity theft. I know it is something serious and that I should be very careful with my finances. With the current economic situation, no one can afford to be a victim of identity theft. And mostly because items that i purchased online was lousy and dissatisfying. Especially with nowadays trends, clothing online shopping is everywhere. I get 5 invites in my Facebook every month, not to mention each of them tagging me every time their new products arrived.
And it makes me thinking how many people out there that also hates online shopping. Apparently, lots of people hate online shopping, and the reasons are :
Takes hour for the pages to load
Many sites have too many objects, too intense use of graphics, and make too poor use of consolidation techniques.
Not everyone has a 10 gbps connection with near-zero latency. In the real world, many people are still using connections speeds below 28.8 kbps. These people are called “paying customers.” They do want to see the merchandise up close and personal, and recognize that loading those useful images can take time, but they don’t want that other 400k of cutesy graphics surrounding the merchandise.
Finally, if your site has won a web graphics design award, you are likely in serious need of a redesign. You are likely featuring something useless but pretty or you wouldn’t have won it. Your job is to move product, not to win awards. Useless but pretty not only slows up transfer, it dazzles the customer and draws him or her away from an appreciation of the product you’re in business to sell. Sales 101.
Lousy Information
a. Insufficient information
If you go into a bricks and mortar store, you have at least three sources of information:
- The merchandise display and any signage the store may have provided.
- The box and manuals supplied with the product.
- Actual human beings you can talk to who may, if you’re lucky, be able to discuss whether the product fills your specific needs.
- Bonus: An 800 number printed on the box, accessible on the spot with a cell phone.
Websites need not provide the same hierarchy of sources, but they must provide the same quality and completeness of information. They need to provide extensive details on the merchandise, along with comparison information. They also need to provide information on how the product might work in the perspective buyer’s application, the kind of information normally gleaned from an experienced salesperson. Many retail sites cover this need this by encouraging customers to write reviews.
Some retailers further back up their web-based information with live chat or even phone service. Others provide less information than may be found on the outside of the box, then wonder why their sales suck.
b. Unintelligible information
They’ve left out important information, like Travel Time. See how long it takes you to compute travel times on your own. Don’t forget to consider that three different time zones are involved. Which three? Beats me. Then, think about looking at a screen with, not two flights, but ten flights.
Please also note that Travelocity lists the flights in chronological order, while Delta lists the flights in order of, um, something.
Progress is not made by everyone reinventing the wheel. It is made by people noticing Charlie’s wheel and adding a greased axle, and so forth. If your design team is not doing competitive analysis, your company will be left behind.
c. Downright wrong information
Legitimate sites don’t purposely provide incorrect information. However, many of them provide either no feedback loop to allow users to report errors, or they make the feedback so difficult to deliver that most people won’t bother. As a result, errors can persist indefinitely.
Search can’t find
There are still a lot of websites with 1960s-era search engines. How many millions is your company willing to throw away because your search engine is telling customers that products you’ve got stacked up to the ceiling don’t even exist? Yes, it’s 1960s engineers that are delivering these wounded birds, but it’s sales, marketing, and upper management that are accepting them.
Under these kinds of primitive search systems:
a) Misspellings are to be punished.
B&H Photo Video Pro Audio is one of many examples of companies suffering from poor quality search facilities. Searches must be exact, or they don’t want to sell to you.
How many customers know to keep trying various combinations of characters and spacing until one magically works? Answer: not many. If the store says “nomatches,” they believe the answer is “no matches.” They just go elsewhere.
b) “OR” searches instead of “AND”
This is another favorite. The more you try to limit the search, the broader it becomes. The world voted on “AND” as a default about a decade ago. Get it together!
They upset the shopping cart
You’ve spent an hour in the supermarket, carefully selecting all the items your family will need for the next three weeks. Now, you’re headed for the checkout counter, a job well done. But wait! The power just went out for 2 seconds! Oh, no! All your food is back out of the cart and on the shelves again!
That’s the experience B&H offers their customers. When my browser crashed, they pulled everything from my shopping cart, forcing me to start all over. Crap!
Customers can check in, but can’t check out
It had core memory—ferrite beads suspended from wires—and vacuum tubes. The memory was infinitesimal—less than that of the original Apple One, and the speed was hundreds of times slower. Programmers in those days did not throw away bits or clock cycles. Both were precious commodities. Computers have what can only be described as gobs of memory, along with blinding speed, speed so extreme that only the finest operating system developers in the world can bring them to a crawl.
And about dates, why does the program default to a date in the distant past, instead of today’s date? And, when making a hotel reservation and I’ve entered a date a week from now, why does the program then guess that I’ll probably, therefore, want to check out a year and a half ago? Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy, as isgiving me a type-in box smaller than that which you want me to type in.
After the sale service
Travelocity, my favorite travel site, emails out weird e-tickets. You know that six-character record locator code that all the airlines live by? It’s not on there, as far as I can tell, and I’ve looked really, really carefully. Instead, there is all kinds of extraneous text having nothing to do with my getting from Indonesia to Maccau (a problem not limited to Travelocity). The reason I was on the Delta site lambasted earlier was so I could actually make the purchase from them and get a proper e-ticket after using Travelocity’s excellent facilities to make my choice.
CC does give you all the information, but their e-tickets. print out weirdly, with each frame (!) on a separate page, so you end up with this wad of paper with lots and lots of white space, in lieu of a single sheet of paper. What’s an e-ticket doing with frames, anyway? This has been going on for years, apparently unnoticed.
Can’t Guarantee the Quality
It’s been three times i bought clothes from online shopping, the way they talk to me pretty convincing that they provide stuff that we’re looking for. After i received it in my hand, i couldn’t agree more if i better buy it at the store. I can examine it first; touch the fabric, know the thickness, see the inseam, neatness and how stretch the fabric can holds. Not to mention, every country has different number and sizes. How do you know if China clothes sizes are the same with US sizes if you didn’t try it out?
Buyer Protection problems
An example of this one is PayPal. They claim a buyer guarantee, and, when you try to pay with a credit card, flaunt the guarantee and tell you that, if you don’t use the card, they’ll enter you in a contest you’re most unlikely to win.
I recently used my card, and I won a much more important contest. I received fraudulent, unusable goods on an ebay auction. It turned out PayPal won’t actually pay out unless you receive absolutely nothing from the seller. Even an empty envelope gets PayPal off the hook. Only because my credit card backed me up was I able to retrieve my money. Great!
So, i don’t think i’d buy another items from shopping online, not even a sextoys, which considered as number 1 items people would only buy it online. 
No thanks…
