Like many of you, I have been doing some online purchasing of gifts for my family this Christmas season. Some sites have been a delight and very simple to use. Others, which should know better have been unnecessarily complex and frustrating. For instance, I ordered a high chair from Babies R Us (part of Toys R Us) to be picked up in Portland OR, where my daughter lives with my new grand twins. 
A couple of clicks, and, voila, all was taken care of, or so I thought. I received my email confirmation and there in the instructions for pick up it states that the person who was on the credit card had to pick it up in person. No where in the previous info did it state this. I called to see if I could get my daughter OK'ed to pick it up, nope, it had to be be. So, I attempted to cancel the order. Couldn't do it! They could not access my order internally for about another 2 days or so, but, if nobody picked up the order I could cancel after that. Of course, I had already received my confirmation and my credit card had been billed. Their excuse, beta software that still had some bugs. Guess who won't be using their online ordering anymore.
Today I tried Omaha Steaks. On the home page, in big print, FREE SHIPPING for orders $59 and above. Right below that, a nice little package that just happenned to cost $59.99. So I ordered 2 for 2 locations. Guess what, it added shipping. It added shipping to any size order that I put in. I called and got hold of someone who was no help, told me that those items were not eligible for free shipping and then hung up on me. I gave one more chance and called again. Got hold of someone who was able to get me the free shipping. It appears what I ordered was eligible but again, there was a software glitch, you had to enter a promo code which was not listed on the site. I might go back to them.
But all of this got me thinking. How are my websites and blogsites working for customers. Does everything work? Do my landing pages come up? Are my links working? Can they do one click to reach me? Does my office voicemail forwarding work? Am I making it easy for someone to contact me? Or am I driving them to someone else's site? So now I am in the process checking out every nook and cranny for links, phone numbers, and other contact information. I want to make sure that its as easy as a click of the mouse to get into contact with me.
After all, if I make it hard for someone to do business with me, why would they?
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