While I would never want to invalidate “Tessa’s critique”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/01/12/zipca-falls-short of “Zip.ca”:http://www.zip.ca I did want to rise to their defence and say that _after you *are* a subscriber_ the service is just fantastic.
I’ve been a customer for over a year now and just *love* them. The site _is_ a bit quirky but once you’ve used it a few times you get the hang of it and everything works just as it is supposed to. They’ve been amazing at delivering and collecting information about my DVDs and their shipping status and responsive to customer service requests. And they use e-mail really, well personalized information about my account when sending regular shipping notifications that my whole family have come to depend on.
Still, Tessa’s points are valid.
Month: January 2006
If an affordable luxury can be considered a guilty pleasure, then mine is most definitely “Netflix”:http://www.netflix.com/. The online DVD rental system is incomparably convenient, and is truly revolutionizing movie rental.
It there’s one downfall to Netflix, it’s that it isn’t yet available in Canada (its original plan to expand to Canada and the UK in 2005 has been “postponed”:http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2004-10-17-netflix-dvd-war_x.htm). So when I was looking for a birthday gift for my brother last year, I started investigating other alternatives. After reading several positive reviews of “Zip.ca”:http://www.zip.ca/ online, I decided to buy a gift membership on the site.
From start to finish, the experience was a lesson in poor online customer service. But that paled in comparison to the defective design of the company’s ecommerce site. It seemed very little attention was paid to facilitating navigation, and its online transaction pages were deeply flawed.
Ken Schafer has one hour to speak to the Council of Communications Directors for the ministries of the Ontario Government tomorrow morning. The topic is “The Big Six For ’06 – The Six Big Internet Trends In 2006”.
Here’s what he’ll be covering…