[ Posted December 2nd, 2003 in design, user experience ]
Well, it’s time to shop for my sister-in-law. She’s just finished a degree in illustration, and so I thought it would be cool to get her a poster of something arty. I eventually decided on The Story of Letters, from Exploratorium. Since she was interested in typography I thought that a gift of a chart that tracked the progress of the modern alphabet might be fun. OK, time to buy.
Getting the poster into the cart and through checkout was fairly painless. I was then asked to choose my shipping address. At least this one has got some options that were resonably easy to understand.
This looked like the one for me:
"UPS Worldwide Express/ Expedited usually deliver within a week, tracked and insured. In many cases, recipient may be required to pay "brokerage fees". See our information for people shipping to Canada (below) for more information on this."
OK, cool, so I chose UPS Worldwide Expedited from the shipping options dropdown list. I wasn’t really sure what the difference was between UPS Worldwide Express and UPS Worldwide Expedited, so just chose one of them. The first surprise was that I couldn’t proceed. Each time I clicked the Continue button I went back to the same page. After a few tries I scrolled up to the top of the page, and saw in big red letters:
Make sure you read our international shipping tips as well as our information on shipping to Alaska or Hawaii.
Was that an error message? I decided to change my shipping option to Worldwide Express to see if it made a difference. Sure enough, I was able to get through to the next stage. Grrr.
The next shock was enough to send me packing from the site. It was going to cost US$65.98 to post a US$9.95 poster! My only other option was to ship International Ground, which would take 6 - 8 weeks, and is not tracked or insured. If I had known the shipping was going to be that high, I wouldn’t have wasted my time.
I ended up getting a poster from OnlineOriental.com. Not the best shopping process either, but the poster looked interesting. Like the last order, I’m going to send it to my house first, just to make sure it’s appropriate. I think that I’ve had enough of theis online shipping buzz though - still too much hard work.
Lessons:
- Show total shipping costs as early as possible.
- Don’t show options that aren’t applicable.
- Word error messages informatively.
Trent
