This past weekend I went on one of my rare, real world shopping expeditions. (As you may recall, I hate shopping.) I found myself standing in the housewares department of my local large department store. And I was annoyed.
I’d gone there in search of a new humidifier and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where the store kept them. Of course no staff were anywhere to be found, and there was no store directory or useful signage in view.
I was about to lose it, and then I got one of my crazy ideas.
Category: E-commerce
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.
Since it’s that time of the year, and I loathe shopping in the real world, I’m spending more than my usual amount of time shopping online.
Last week I was on Henry’s Website in the middle of purchasing some camera gear when I stumbled across a touch of pure e-commerce genius. Right below the section of the shopping cart where I could enter my credit card information was a simple but powerful eight-word sentence that rocked my world.
Next to an optional checkbox was written…