worst e-commerce experience ever!
July 24, 2008 – 3:31 pm
Ahh, where do I start? First, a little background. I have been buying online for 10 years and have probably spent well over one million dollars online between personal and business purchases in that time. I have also worked for two large Internet companies that provide e-commerce (Digital River) and marketing services (ValueClick) and have worked with literally thousands of e-tailers including MacMall/PCMall (I actually sold them on CJ for their affiliate program) as well as companies like Ebay, Yahoo!, Buy.com, Best Buy and Symantec. So I feel qualified to critique online shopping experiences from both the customer’s perspective as well as the retailer’s perspective.
Now on to my worst e-commerce experience ever! I needed to buy ten 2GB PC2 5300 677MHz RAM modules. I did a search on The Google and saw that MacMall had a very good price for what I needed. I added the items to my cart and checked out. So far, so good. Within an hour, I got a call from Reid Jackson introducing himself as my SMB rep and he emailed me his contact info for future reference. He also mentioned that I had ordered the wrong type of RAM and explained the difference and changed my order. Again, so far, so good.
Here is where things go straight downhill. I begin to get calls to my home and cell from MacMall’s credit authorization department (located in Malaysia I was later told). Now I am not talking about one message on each phone with instructions to call them back to resolve the issue - no, I am talking about one call after the other resulting in maybe 12 calls over 5 hours.
I call the credit authorization dept. and in the process of getting connected to a real person, my call is dropped. I call them back and finally get through to a person. They inform me that they cannot ship my order to the address I specified since it is not on my credit card. I would need to call my credit card and have that address added to the account. I inform MacMall that I had just place a significantly larger order from Apple.com using the same information and the order was processed with no questions asked.
Next she tells me that the address I gave them is not the business that is located there and the phone number for that business is disconnected. She then asks me what number I am calling her from. I tell her I do not understand her question. She then asks; “is this your cell phone”? She tells me I need to call her back from my home number (the number on my credit card) in order for her to process the order. I tell her that would be a 30 mile drive and that I was not going to drive home and call her in order to buy products from them. She put me on hold and while on hold, yet another credit authorization person calls my cell. I switch over and tell them I am already on the phone with one of their reps). When I switch back I am still on hold where I waited another 5 minutes before hanging up and calling them back.
When I get to a real person again, the same run-a-round begins again. They keep asking me to jump through hoops and I keep telling them that no one does these types of things and either they ship the order with the info they have or I will cancel my order. She starts back in with the run-a-round and I tell her to cancel my order and that I will never do business with PCMall or MacMall again - then I hang up.
Now I call my SMB rep Reid and leave him a message that I am very upset with MacMall and would he please call me back. He calls me back in about 15 minutes. I retell my story to him and he tells me he feels the same way that the credit authorization dept. in Malaysia always causes these type of problems. He even tells me that he often feels like “banging his head against a brick wall” because it is so frustrating working there. He says he is sorry and will personally process my order, ship it overnight for free and toss in a gift for me.
Now you’re probably saying to yourself; “all’s well that ends well” right? Well unfortunately this isn’t the end of my worst e-commerce experience ever! The next day I get my package, including my free gift (a 2GB thumb drive - now I have seventeen of these things). I look at the order and there is an invoice for the full amount but when I look at the product, I only got five modules, not ten. I call Reid back and tell him what happended. He says that someone else changed the order after he submitted it. I ask him if he was going to process my order personally, how could this mistake happen and why would Jose or whatever the guys name was change an order for no reason. He then says; “I don’t know, do you want to speak to Jose about it”? He then tells me that he will have his supervisor/manager call me back to handle everything.
So now this manager guy calls me and says he will personally ship the rest of my order next day for free. After hanging up (and not getting his name or number), I look more closely at my invoice and realize that they also charged me for the more expensive product which Reid had changed for me on my original order. So now I call Reid up and point this out to him and he credits me $200. Remaining product arrives the next day. End of worst e-commercce experience ever!
During this whole painful process, I kept kicking myself for (a) ordering from MacMall in the first place, (b) not canceling my order from MacMall and finally (c) not ordering from a real e-tailer like Buy.com in the first place. I promise to never buy from MacMall again and I will never stray from my favorite retailers like Buy.com, Apple, Amazon, etc. They understand how to service customers, scale their business and retain customers, not drive them away with a really bad taste in their mouth regretting ever doing business with them. Also, for the record, I called the President of MacMall, Rory K. Zaks and left him a message that I had a very bad customer experience and to please call me back. Guess what? Yup, he never called me back.
