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Posted on February 1st, 2010 by Jon Honeyball
Where online businesses go terribly wrong
Few things annoy me more than large companies whose web-based eshop indicates a level of stock which is, in reality, a total fiction. They don’t have the stock, it’s just there as a ruse to get you to hand over your credit card details and place the order with them.
But coming in a close second are those companies who issue paper invoices and offer an online payments system. When you get to the payments page, you can look up your Customer Number, or in this particular case, your DHL Air Waybill No. And then you discover that the numbers you have simply don’t work on their e-system.
So you resort to phoning them, and you get through to a polite chap who umms and arrrs and says that these invoices are clearly not on “the system” and transfers you to a black hole of continual plinky plonk music and a voice telling me how important my custom is to them.
So Mr DHL, given that your systems don’t appear to accept that I actually exist, and that these invoices have never been generated, can I therefore assume that I don’t owe you anything? After all, if your internal processes are so screwed up that you are able to generate invoices for import VAT and duty that’s owed, presumably from a database somewhere, but you can’t join this up with your payments system, then clearly it’s not my problem?
And it’s not just DHL – TNT, a company whose services I otherwise rate highly, will quite happily generate a red warning letter for late payment a whole working week after you have paid them by credit card. According to the staff at their call centre, it takes 14 days for their payments-inwards system to talk to their accounts ledgers.
One wonders how these companies manage to pass any sort of audit for their end-of-year accounts.
Tags: online shopping
Posted in: Online business, Rant
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February 1st, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Had a frustrating experience with Royal Mail the other week. I had something delivered from overseas and it needed customs payment. So they gave me a reference number and directed me to their http://www.royalmail.com/fee2pay/ web site.
But the web site has no knowledge of the reference number. You have to tell it the reference, what type of payment it is and tell it how much it is that they want from you. First annoyance.
But then they cap it all by asking you to enter the full address this refers to (no postcode lookup available here) and then when you put your credit card details in you have to enter your full address again. It doesn’t pull it over, and again no postcode lookup.
I guess that postcode data is too precious to even share internally!
The whole thing feels like it was put together on a Friday afternoon to get a ‘web enabled’ tick in the box. God only knows what happens in the background afterwards. Probably gets sent by telex to holding sorting office… Good work Royal Mail.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:49 pm
I suspect that these very annoying companies (I could name a few more!)rely on “systems” that are not quite as systematic as they would like.
Whilst I don’t expect miracles from a one-person Ebay shop, I rather expect big companies to have a stock-control system that actually notices when goods are scanned-out of the warehouse.
I think Frank Zappa had it right. It’s “Cheepnis”
February 1st, 2010 at 4:18 pm
1. You could sue for libel,( injury to credit rating!)if they send a you have not paid notice after you have paid and they send it by open email or a non secure system.
February 1st, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Don’t forget online banks. I recently made a deposit by debit card to my ISA that failed to go through even though the amount I can deposit for the current tax year shows the correct amount has been deducted. I now have to wait 3 to 4 working days (?!) for the transaction officially to fail before the bank pursues matters further.
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:33 pm
The problem is poor design of these systems. Sometimes it is dopey designers to blame but often it is a lack of clear direction from the business wanting the system.
The whole point of any IT system is for speed of information retrieval, processing and passing onto others.
Clearly these examples don’t match that ideal at all..
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:07 am
I’m not sure it is poor design; very often it is poorly chosen targets. One humungously vast bank merger I saw from the inside set as a target “unified systems” within 6 months of the merger starting. Unfortunately those who set the target, didn’t realise that the flavour of MVS (I think!) they were using would support virtualisation. Hey presto, the IT group claimed system merger once they had fitted two virtual mainframes into one, much larger, physical mainframe. The operation still depended on people printing out excel sheets and swiping them with hilighters where there was a mismatch…
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Well, I have to say that I haven’t had a problem with an online business since, ooh, Monday.
Virgin, (my home broadband provider) sent me a letter saying that my payment card had expired, and that as I hadn’t set up a new payment method my latest payment was now overdue.
This was on Monday 1st Feb, and rather contradicted the email they sent me on the 2nd January – thanking me for setting up my Direct Debit online and giving me the reference code for it…
The lady I spoke to was all very polite and apologetic, but it’s hardly the point.
Also, talking about bad systems, on both occasions they sent me an email confirmation with my FULL debit card details and sort code – as opposed to the usual ‘**** **** 1234′ format.
I really think that’s atrocious protocol for a company as large as Virgin, but was fobbed off with the ‘that’s our policy and it’s perfectly safe’ nonsense.
Very poor form from a company that should really know better.
May 6th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
I had three letters from TV licencing in the last two weeks. First is letter thanking me for paying by direct debit. Second is a letter with my licence. Third is a letter I got yesterday warning of DIRE CONSEQUENCES if I do not pay my TV licence. Rang up and it was explained that it takes at least two weeks for the fact I have paid and got a licence database to register in the ‘has not paid send nasty letter’ database.