Webby Thoughts

I wanted to order a few T-shirts from Threadless for my wife and kids for Christmas and even pick up one or two for me, too.  They make some pretty cool shirts and they are a semi-local, relatively small company.

I picked out my first shirt and added it to the shopping cart.  Then I tried to find a “continue shopping” type of link.  It is not anywhere on the shopping cart page.  I even searched through the html source code.  Their FAQ page says their is a Continue shopping link, but I can’t find it.
So, I tried going back to the homepage and adding another item to the cart.  It didn’t work.  I tried using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox.  No luck.  It might be there somewhere, but I can’t figure it out.
Now, it is getting close to Christmas, so I really did not want to wait a few days for customer service to get around to answering my email, so I tried to find their phone number.  I figured they could show me how to do it or just take the order over the phone.

They do have a phone number, but they do not want you to use it.

This is from their contact page:

Please note that we do not officially provide phone support. If you have sent a service inquiry and have not heard back from us within 3 business days, it is probably because your spam filter is blocking our emails.

Who doesn’t officially provide phone support?  And, I don’t really have 3 business days to wait to hear back about how I can order some of their shirts.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like to be able to call companies that I am ordering from.  I don’t really like them telling me they would prefer me not to call.

So, I will be buying something else for Christmas and Threadless loses the sale of 5 T-shirts.  All because of a bad shopping cart and an unfriendly contact policy.

I got asked to get a few quotes for a 3rd party to set up a Data Warehouse while my company works on a different project. The two projects are kind of sister projects for the client in question.

I know very little about the data warehousing business so I start google’ing to find a few companies to get quotes from.

I get a voicemail when I dial through to the sales department. I had to have this quote before then end of today, so I don’t really have time to get ignored until tomorrow. So I hung up and dialed the next person on the list.

Same thing.

I find a different number for the first company and finally get through to somebody. The quote $250K+.

I call another company. Right around the same price. I call a fourth company and get the voicemail routine again.

So, we have two quotes. Two companies that did not have time to talk to me and did not provide a way for me to talk to a human to find out if the person that would be receiving the voice mail was in the office or on vacation.

Seems like if I was selling something that I was planning on charging $250K for the low end version, I would make sure that every single call to the sales number was answered by a human. That human could route the potential buyer to a voice mail, but the buyer should always have the opportunity to ask a couple simple questions like is so and so there, is there somewhere online I can find more information, etc.

That’s a lot of potential cash to throw away because some irrational IT guy does not feel like leaving a voice mail.

Technorati Tags: rant, sales, IT