On Monday, I tried placing an order online for some antenna wire with one of the leading amateur radio retailers. I got through the checkout procedure, up to the point where I had to type in my credit card info, and when I clicked “Submit,” the website went haywire and sent me back to the retailer’s homepage. There was no acknowledgement that the order had been placed, so I assumed that perhaps I’d clicked the wrong thing. I went through the order process again, only to have the same thing happen.
At that point, I e-mailed the retailer, and described what had happened. I asked them to check if an order had been placed, and in the event that two orders had been placed, noted that I only wanted one of them.
On Tuesday, I got a reply from one of their customer service representatives. He noted that he could only find a record of an order that I placed last October.
I phoned the company and spoke with this customer service rep. I explained again what had happened, and he blew me off, saying, “Well, the problem must be on your end. We must have had 60 web orders yesterday.”
He seemed equally unconcerned (clueless?) when I said, “Sure, you may have had 60 successful orders, but you don’t know how many orders that you lost because the customers were unable to complete their purchases.” What I said went in one ear and right out the other.
I was both baffled and concerned by this guy’s reaction.I know that whenever someone seems to have a problem ordering my books from KB6NU.Com, I’m all over it.
Not only was he quick to blame the way my web browser was set up, he didn’t really seem to care about his website security. Chances are my credit card information has disappeared into the bit bucket, but I really have no way to know that for sure. It could now be in the hands of someone who’ll use it for no good. I truly hope that’s not the case.
I’ve always respected this retailer, but now I’ll certainly have second thoughts about ordering from them again.
Dave says
This sort of post means nothing without the vendors name,,,
Bob, KG6AF says
Time for a call to the company CEO…
Mike pfeifer says
Cust relations would generally refer you to the webmaster for the site, as they are typically outsourced to a separate company to build and maintain. I get your beef, but really there’s likely nothing cust relations would be able to do about it besides let the webmaster know there was a complaint of an error.
That complaint referral will likely have very little detail and so probably the webmaster would not be able to replicate the problem.
I agree with making sure there was no double order by calling the retailer, but for the site error, your best bet is contacting the webmaster directly. There should be a link on the site to do so.
I’ve had very prompt responses from webmasters with fixed websites in a few hours at most. My best experience with this to date is American musical supply, where there was a search box issue on Apple Safari. Couple of questions and a screen shot later, fixed.
Good luck in the future,
W9MHZ
Dan KB6NU says
I expected this company to contact whomever maintains that website and at least report the problem. Instead, all I got is, “I’m sorry, but we’re getting plenty of orders, and as far as data security, we protect customers’ information as best we can.” That kind of response does not make me very confident that they’re protecting my customer information, and I probably won’t be ordering from them in the future.
Jonathan, KA8KPN says
If you have the time of the transaction, then you can pull the logs and see what happened. If there is a single event in that approximate time frame, then you can trace it through and figure out what happened.
If there’s multiple events, then you’ve got a problem. A problem report should at least get the logs pulled because otherwise you don’t know how many people are having the issue. You do NOT want to be in a situation where people aren’t sure whether or not their credit cards have been charged. That leads to chargebacks and can cause a dramatic increase in your discount rate and, therefore, the cost of doing business on the Internet or even at a brick-and-mortar store.
The thing is, your customer service people are the public face of your organization. If they’re not doing it right, then your public face is tarnished.
Oliver Krystal says
I think I know this company. I can’t even log into my account there and the sales rep seemed unhappy when I requested tracking for a order that I never got an alert that it shipped. Nor did he want to do anything about the fact that I couldn’t log in. “Not his job” apparently.
I’ll be spending my money elsewhere, even if it costs more.
Razvan, YO9IRF says
It would be interesting to know the vendor’s name, just to have a look at their website. Probably you ended up talking to the wrong person in that company, but if they have a half decent web guy he could see if they lose customers / orders from a technical fault. There are some industry reference values for website conversion rates and any serious issue would bring up a red flag pretty quickly.