Working at a company whose traffic is largely impacted by holidays, I understand the extra consideration which goes in to making your site available for such occasions. Extra servers are tapped, caching systems are put in place and code is frozen. Two experiences in the past week reveal some companies, like Amazon and Webkinz, don’t take this extra surge in traffic very seriously.

Alana’s family lives in Florida so she bought their presents on Amazon to ensure they’d arrive by Christmas. She got all the way into the checkout process before finding out some of her items were out of stock. This forced her to go backwards in the browser, abandoning her cart.

An hour later she had all her items again and was ready to ship, but this is only the first part of her shopping woes.

Alana has only ever used Amazon once before, when she sent something to my Dad’s house. When she finished her first order, she added her parents’ address as the shipping address. But when she had to go back through and start all over a second time, she didn’t realize her order would now choose what Amazon perceived to be her default address. When she completed the order, her details page didn’t show a shipping address, so only an hour later when she got her confirmation email did she find out all her family’s gifts were going to my Dad’s house.

The shopping experience quickly became one of the worst we’ve had online. Upon realizing her mistake Alana frantically called Amazon’s customer service. She got an extremely helpful employee who assured her the problem was corrected. The next day, her Dad’s GPS unit showed up at my Dad’s house. The customer service rep forgot to change the address on one of the items.

Alana called customer service again to find out how to remedy the situation. She got someone in India who couldn’t understand her, or what she wanted. Because he couldn’t understand her, he told her she didn’t have an account. Then he put her on hold for 20 minutes, presumably getting someone to translate. The best they said they could do was have us ship the item back to Amazon with special labels, then Amazon would send it to her parents. It would show up a week after Christmas. They told her they could refund her the $30 she spent on shipping (just for that item) for her troubles. That not being an acceptable solution, we had to drive an hour to go get the GPS unit, an hour back, and then send it express mail with the USPS.

Initially the problem appears to be one of user error. Except, where an item is normally listed as out of stock on the product page, Alana simply got “unavailable” where availability and the price should be. One of those “add this to your cart before we’ll tell you how much it costs” deals. Not showing a price up front is poor UI. You cannot fault your users for serious flaws in your interface and checkout process, and then ultimately flaws in your terrible customer service. A UI must be easy, it must make sense to people who have never used your site before, especially around the holidays when more new users are likely to be experiencing your site.

Here are my recommendations to Amazon to prevent future problems:

1. If an item is out of stock don’t make this ambiguous. Call attention to it differently than other items on the page, either with text size or color. Alert the customer as soon as they add this item to their cart that it is out of stock. And always display a price and availability on the product page.
2. Never pre-select a shipping address if the customer isn’t using one-click shopping. If you’re going to create a default shipping address for them, instead of using the first address they send something to, choose their billing address.
3. Let them out of checkout screens and back into shopping at any point. Make removing items from their cart easy in checkout, not just the initial cart summary. No one should ever lose their entire order because they had to change an item at the last minute.
4. Show the shipping address in the order details, not just the confirmation email.
5. Send a follow up email summarizing any customer service calls. As in “Customer Service Rep #24358745 changed the shipping address of the following items” etc.
6. Have customer service reps that speak English as their first language if the customer is calling from the US. If I’m calling customer service I’m already agitated, do not multiply this tenfold by having customer service I can’t communicate with. That’s not customer service, that’s customer disservice. I don’t need the person on the other end of the phone yelling at me, or telling me I don’t have an account. I want someone on the phone who understands me and can take the actions required to correct my problem.
7. If you majorly fuck up send me something for my troubles. An apology note, an Amazon gift certificate, an email when you fix your shoddy UI, I don’t care what it is, just make me aware you sympathize with my terrible experience, and would like me to come back. I know you’re the largest online retailer, but you’re crazy if you think I’m stuck with you.

In the end our problem was solved, but only as a result of our own fancy footwork, and now we’re out a hell of a lot of mobile minutes, the time we wasted talking to Amazon, then at the post office, and our two hours in the car. A very bad taste has been left in my mouth, and I’m not likely to ever use Amazon again for anything critical.

Our second poor experience was with Webkinz. Webkinz are basically a stuffed animal that comes with an online Tamagatchi. Kids go crazy for them like beanie babies, so naturally one of the 7 year olds in our family got several for Christmas.

Each Webkinz comes with a special code, which is then registered on their website, allowing you to play with your virtual pet. I set out with the mission of creating a user account, and then registering four Webkinz. I ran into problems right away. It took somewhere between 10 and 20 attempts just to get the site to load. There was a message about holiday traffic possibly creating problems, so this was a step in the right direction, at least they were aware of the problem. I then make my way to the “new user” process, again requiring me to reload several times. After watching a giant bird speak I’m given a prompt which allows me to begin. Unfortunately, this prompt is below the fold and there are no scroll bars allowing me to get to the button I need to continue. I try using the mouse’s scroll wheel, which also didn’t work, leaving me to believe it had something to do with that entire window being Flash.

I then have to go to a new computer, with a larger monitor where i can get the window big enough to see the button. So I have to start all over again, refreshing constantly along the way. I finally begin to create a new user account, but no inline validation is performed to check my user name. I don’t find out until after 50 times of trying to submit the form that I must try another user name. This also requires a zillion more tries because of server unresponsiveness. (Try telling a little kid they have to wait for their present after they’ve already opened it.)

I finally have an account and a secure password. I enter my first Webkinz secret code, only to be greeted by a CAPTCHA, or at least what was supposed to be a CAPTCHA. Instead I get a blank space with the instructions “Type the letters above in the box below.” Um okay. I go back to the previous page, enter the code all over again, re-submit, and now the CAPTCHA loads. Same problem with the second Webkinz, so I try to get wise and copy the code so I can paste it when I have to reload to get the CAPTCHA. No dice, they don’t allow you to paste characters into that input field. So for four Webkinz, I must type the stupid codes in 8 times because their stupid CAPTCHA won’t load. Imagine a 7 year old trying to do that by herself.

Here’s my solutions for Webkinz:

1. Get some image caching or extra servers for the holidays. If your product, which requires online registration, is selling out in stores across America that’s a pretty good indicator your website is going to get slammed on Christmas.
2. If you experience such high traffic users can’t even get on the site (basically making their product worthless) switch to a lower bandwidth technology. Perhaps you need Flash for a rich virtual pet experience. You do not need it for the basic site, or the registration process. Some well styled text would have done just fine.
3. If you experience load problems, don’t make an image (particularly a CAPTCHA) essential for completing registration (or any other important process,) because chances are good it won’t load.
4. Let me use copy and paste anywhere I want in the process. It’s not like I can register the same Webkinz twice, so what’s the harm?

Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 9:30 am | Leave A Comment | Comments Feed
Filed under: Web Design Tags: customer service, usability, user experience, user interface