Ecommerce Checkout Issues at Pet Smart and Barnes & Noble
Shopping Online Bothersome
Often I shop online and have issues with websites not working correctly. Earlier this year I shopped for some pet products at PetSmart.com. It became a headache, as I would place items in the cart and they would disappear during checkout. I finally had to open Internet Explorer to start my order all over again with Pet Smart. I went ahead and emailed their technical department, who called me a few weeks later to ask for help debugging their issue. Unfortunately I had other issues going on to deal with. I haven’t been back to see if the site still has issues.
Today I decided to place an order at Barnes & Noble for a book called Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP. The book mentions my web hosting company GotWebHost.com on page 25. I tried adding my member card a few times at Barnes & Noble’s website, but it wasn’t taking it. The FAQ’s made it sound like you put it in the coupon code spot. That is what I was trying to do. I called them, and the customer service rep was very helpful and prepared to take the order. As soon as she said sometimes the membership number box doesn’t show up for some people I knew what the problem was. I opened Internet Explorer and had no problems order and seeing the membership number box. I told her she should let her the technical department know they are having issues with Firefox.
Both companies were having issues during checkout when a consumer (myself) was using Firefox. Most consumers would of probably gave up. I can’t image how many sales they have lost. Sales they should of never lost. With all the advertising these big companies do, I would think they would have someone on staff in their technical departments that checks for browser issues. Since these sites may be updated often, they should be checked often. Firefox may not be as popular as IE, but it is a well known browser. It is a strict browser as well. So if the development teams build and test in Firefox, most likely it will work in IE as well.
Now if a website could just track how many sales are lost because of browser issues, even if you knew a percentage of sales lost. You could track how much advertising money was wasted because the website wasn’t prepared to do business with all users.