dpd1 - 7:35 am on Jul 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

A few gems I experienced today...

A vendor who use to be pretty decent, apparently slipped into insanity recently. They dumped their whole old site and replaced it with a horrificly screwed up one, where thousands of categories are not alphabetized... They took away the ability to see if something is in stock, and then added a feature where you have to "register" to buy. I tried to register, then it said I have to have a 'customer ID' to do that. 15 minutes later after digging through my invoices from last year, I find my ID and put it in. It says thanks, then refuses to let me in. Then it sends me an email saying that I have not been 'allowed' as a customer yet. Apparently they have to 'allow' you to be their customer and give them money. Which I have already done in the past, giving them thousands of dollars. I guess that's not enough to be able to freakn' buy something on the site. I deserved it, since they took 3 months to refund payment on an overcharge last time I used them, and it took about 8 calls to finally get them to do it.

Next site was another vendor. Out of the last two orders (my first with them), they put in the wrong items each time. So they're two for two. (I've never sent anybody the wrong item a single time in 10 years) I went to email them about it and found that they have an anti spam confirmation setup on their email, so I then had to spend 10 minutes filling that out. It's like... 'Sorry, we don't like wasting our time with spam... So we'll make our customers waste their time instead'.

Third try today was searching desperately to find another vendor to sell me the stuff I needed from the first guys. Virtually every site I went to was a total disaster. I tried the least of the offenders... went through the painful process of navigating their site to get all the right parts... Had to fill out the info twice (no auto repeat on the shipping address)... then on the last step it informed me that I had to buy 100 pieces of the item to meet the minimum. I wanted 5. No mention of this anywhere on the products or on the site.

Is business really so good that people can do this stuff? Seriously... Shocking.