Pet hate with ecom sites

[Essex_boy]

Pricing - I book a lot of small hotels room - Price £xx but whenyou book its £xx+20%, soooooo annoying.

Anyone else ?

[mack]

I agree with that one. I also extend it to any company that aims at consumers, yet shows prices - vat (20%).

Just show me the price lol

Mack.

[lucy24]

There have been a few earlier threads about sites that flatly refuse to show you the shipping rate until after you've started placing the order ... and then they wonder why people abandon their carts midway.

Sales tax (in the US) is not as large an amount as your typical VAT. But really, how hard is it to add a "calculate tax for {dropdown list}" button?

[LifeinAsia]

Sites that force you to create an account before you can buy. Unless it's a one of a kind item or significantly less (20% or more) than I can get it elsewhere, I'm not going to create an account just to buy something.

Sites that only ship to the U.S., yet still have a drop-down list of all the countries. Plus you have to scroll through almost to the end to get to the U.S.!

Sites that don't ship to APO/FPO addresses (overseas military and government workers).

[jimbeetle]

I hate ecom sites that don't get the idea that the mission is to move product. An example from today:

Search. Click. Home page opens. Roadblock "Hey, sign up for our email alerts."

Find product link. Click. Product page opens. Roadblock "Would you like to take a survey about our site?"

Leave site.

So, I viewed two pages and got two roadblocks not related to selling me stuff right now.

[lucy24]

Roadblock "Would you like to take a survey about our site?"

I tend to get these after I have viewed several pages in a futile attempt to get information about some particular subject. At that point it is a real pleasure to click "Yes, you betcha" so that once I've given up any effort to find the information I was looking for (like, say, the opening hours of their local store which they profess to be able to locate), I can give the site the lowest possible ratings on their own survey.

[incrediBILL]

As far as Hotels are concerned, I think they show THEIR price and exclude the additional taxes because all the extra stuff technically isn't their room rate, it's government greed.

However, If you pay the price shown, you're just pissing money away.

Funny you bring hotels up as we stayed overnight for Christmas at a Hilton Double Tree. My wife hit the site 5 different ways using various discount codes before she got a great price. She managed to knock it down from around $139/night to $89/night. Turns out there was a local casino and we got the "Casino Rate" discount which is way better than the others so-called 'deals'.

Always check for a local casino ;)

When we can't get a good rate online we've called the hotel and booked via the desk clerk and gotten significant discounts that way. If you schmooze the clerks, assuming it's not a jerk clerk, they can book under 'deals' we had no clue existed.

Always worth calling the clerk before registering.

Hotel pricing, esp. online, is such a scam.

There have been a few earlier threads about sites that flatly refuse to show you the shipping rate until after you've started placing the order ... and then they wonder why people abandon their carts midway.

How I resolved that on my ecom software back in the day was to ask people for their zip code.

What people don't understand though is sometimes it's the same price for multiple products because your location or an odd sized product can really skew the price.

Then the shopper can select next day, 2-day, or the slow boat from Japan options which changes everything again.

Too many factors in shipping, it's just a PITA.

But there's no excuse for sites not showing shipping except there's a perception that if they can get you to invest all your time filling the cart that you'll complete the sale. Wrong.

All it does is piss people off and make them less likely to be a future customer.

[Leosghost]

re..

How I resolved that on my ecom software back in the day was to ask people for their zip code.

;)

Personal hate that fortunately is becoming more rare, is when ecom sites sell worldwide, but their "back end" only accepts postcodes that match their national system..

USA sites that only accept zip codes..even though you have already chosen your country as one of the "non USA" ones in the drop down..or UK sites that likewise only accept UK post codes, no matter to them that you have already chosen a non UK country..

The worst case of the latter used to be the company " netbanx" that handled the payments system for companies house ( official companies register of the UK )..hundreds of thousands of us living outside of the UK could file in our annual returns etc "online" via the companies house website..

But at the moment we had to pay..we would be passed to the netbanx payment gateway, we could choose our credit card type, fill in our details, choose our country, then it would ask ( mandatory field ) for our postcode..and some half wit had programmed it to only accept UK postcodes !

So we could not complete payment because the cart threw us out ( and it checked "made up" postcodes against the actual UK postcode database and threw out those which did not match the addresses you gave it )..This meant phoning up companies house ( how much that cost from some countries, such as India or South Africa etc, one can only guess at, 10 minute call minimum ) and reading out the credit card details ( including the CCV ) over the phone to the accounts dept at companies house..

Failure to make the payments could result in having one's company "struck off" the register, fines, prison terms etc..

This ludicrous situation lasted about 5 years ( Companies house said that there was nothing they could do about it from their end, the "cart" was not theirs, "netbanx" didn't care ( I phoned them about it more than once ) they said that only non UK residents were affected ( as if we didn't know that )..and that they would not fix the system until the contract came up for renewal!

Now it works..

[Essex_boy]

incrediBILL- I mainly book int o small hotels (20 rooms) or B&B, it mainly B&B that do this (mom and pop store)

My fav hotel is in melbourne, Derbyshire the hotel is directly above an indian curry house, being part of the hotel the smell of spice when you down for breakfast...... Love it !

[piatkow]

Anything that doesn't show you the full price until you create an accout or enter your card details.

I was researching booking fees at ticket agencies for a piece that I intended to write and kept hitting the problem that I couldn't see the booking fee until I gave them my card number.

I have hit one or two sites recently that require a mobile number as back up contact details. Where I live the phone is a thing on a wire, the one in my pocket only becomes active a mile down the road.

[lucy24]

Oh, and let's not forget retailers that require you to create an account before you can even view the site, never mind place an order. Clearly some vendors have an exaggerated notion of their product's uniqueness and importance. (And some customers must share the delusion, or no such site would remain in business beyond the first year.)

[incrediBILL]

USA sites that only accept zip codes

If they don't ship outside the USA then it's irrelevant. I never shipped internationally myself unless someone paid by wire transfer.

On international sites you picked the country from a droplist and then entered the local postal code.

Really now that hard to implement as long as your primary shipper supports international pricing.

@lucy - if I have to register, before, during or after, they lost the sale. I'm shopping and paying for products, not joining a website.

The proper way to handle that without pissing off customers is after the sale is 100% complete, ask the customer it they wouldn't mind creating a password so they can quickly checkout the next time using their email address and password to retrieve their account details. After someone had already typed in their billing and shipping details, being offered a way not to repeat that process by typing in a simple password didn't seem so bad.

I allowed customers to do order tracking as long as they had the order number. It wouldn't disclose any account details other than the order was paid, processed, shipped and a tracking code.

[piatkow]

USA sites that only accept zip codes

If they don't ship outside the USA then it's irrelevant.

More commonly its requiring a state to be selected and none of the sites that I have had this with have blocked my download because it isn't from a US IP address.

With UK sites its the ones that require a county name which has no relevance for delivery.