Tozai Todd

Goofus and Gallant.

Borders: Looks nice, but a pokey site with crap status checking. Oh, and if you want to cancel that order that hasn’t shipped yet, sorry, it’s just not possible. That’s order fulfillment, you know. Check our Returns Policy for some, you know, information.

Amazon: Looks adequate, but fast as hell. You want to cancel that order? No problem. Just log in, check your orders, and cancel it before it ships. Done and done. See you next time.

Update: The above still stands, but to be fair to Borders, they did ship the order after 2 days and they even honored a coupon code that backfired on them (instead of $5 off the whole purchase, it gave $5 off each item in the cart), and the books arrived as scheduled. If they could do anything to improve the experience, it would be:

• Work out the bugs in the website as quickly as possible, and add some caching or something to make pages load faster;
• If an order is going to take a couple of days to fulfill, in addition to sending an email confirming an order has been placed, send another one just letting me know that it is actually being processed. Better yet, work on getting the order processed within just a few hours. Don’t leave me hanging for two days wondering if you’re doing anything, especially when your site says an item is usually processed within 24 hours. That makes me feel lied to. At least keep me informed, but best to just follow through on the 24-hour expectation you created;
• Give me more control over the process. If I want to cancel some items or an entire order, let me do it. If it takes a couple of days for it to be processed anyway, there’s no technical reason not to let me. A business reason? Sure. But here’s an idea: See the above and work on faster fulfillment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 6:18 pm and is filed under quick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.