On Tuesday morning I finally decided to commit myself to an exercise program and ordered a set of popular exercise videos. Actually ended up spending more than I’d planned and now I’m not sure I’m totally happy with it. The shopping cart and whole order system is good for the seller but bad for the customer. How can that be?

1. At time of order, I was directed to a splash page where you only had two choices. Yes upgrade me or No thanks. As a marketer, I thought this is good marketing. The package looked interesting to me so I said yes just to put the item in the cart for now and to review it before final checkout. It gave me a few other upgrade and accessory offers which I declined.

But upon order confirmation, I was not given the option to remove any of the additional products. So I had no choice but to go through with the order or abandon the cart and start over.

Some marketers might say that’s good because you don’t allow them to change their minds and lose the (extra) sales. But… if the shopper abandons the cart to start all over two things may happen.

If the customer is highly motivated she’ll complete the order. If she’s not and you got her on impulse purchase the first time, she’ll either not start over and leave without buying altogether or she’ll get distracted with other stuff on the site or she’ll get frustrated and say she’ll come back tomorrow to order – which may or may not happen.

2. I had no order successful notification by email, despite ordering 3 different items. I waited 12 hours, still nothing. So I called up customer service to ask the status of my order – yes I’m anxious to get my pre-mommy figure back 😉 – they said they needed 48 hours before orders would be loaded into their system. So here’s what went down:

Me: What? How many hours?
Rep: 48 hours. Call us back after 48 hours and I can pull up your order to tell you what’s going on.
Me: — silence. Too dumfounded — then, Ok.

Hey what can you say right? No point screaming and being a pain about it – it’s not the rep’s fault the system sucks! I told my husband I probably should charge them a very expensive consulting fee to get their online order system right. There’s clearly a disconnect somewhere. I suspect, the company, one who’s built on TV phone in orders. The web store is an addition that came in later. It could be, instead of upgrading or switching which would mean a lot of time and money they decided to go with a delayed reporting route on two separate order systems. But even so…. 48 hours??? They probably don’t get many Internet orders.

They may have saved money on the upgrade but they lost money through the toll free calls to customer service and the rep’s time attending to questions like mine. So, when you find yourself in need to upgrade or switch technologies. Consider the impact. Are you saving now only to pay back all that later in customer service cost?

If you’re starting out, research your shopping cart in detail. Ask for a demo – most have and when in demo mode don’t just look around. Simulate an order from a customer’s point. Upload some products complete with special offers and simulate order fulfillment to test the backend.

So here I am, counting down the hours. Good thing for them, my enthusiasm and drive to lose those pounds is very very high now 😉