On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Chris Barnes wrote: > Yeah it's a shame. Their site is nice and easy to navigate, their prices > aren't too bad but it really cheezed me off when I waited 2 weeks to find > out my order hadn't been shipped because my credit card was rejected and no > one told me until I called them 2 weeks later. After I finally got the goods > it was the wrong stuff. I called them and told them they sent the wrong gear > but they just told me to send it back at my expense and it will be replaced. > If they put a little more effort into looking after customers then I might > consider buying from them again. > It's a damn shame, that's all I can say.
This sort of thing isn't uncommon. People seem to think at 2 ends of the spectrum when it comes to E-Commerce. a) Many businesses think it's just too hard and won't go near it because they have a perfectly good system where people ring/fax/drop in to place orders. b) Others think that they know a bit of HTML and someone showed them a bit of php/perl/asp so it shouldn't be too hard to write a system to take orders over the net. Neither one seems to realise that the key to a good e-commerce site is good scalable back-end-infrastructure. Let me re-iterate that "The key to a good e-commerce site is good scalable back-end-infrastructure" and that includes good products, procedures, good personel, couriers, internet providers, programmers, customer service and everything that makes a normal business successful. The website can be considered a magnification of your back-end be it good or bad. The people in the a) category just need a good e-comm web site design and they're laughing. The people in the b) category are going to go nuts unless they rapidly deploy a good system after an initial honeymoon period when they suddenly come to the realisation they have something that can't cope with the workload. I speak from experience in both a) and b) cases. a) www.ce.com.au (you can create a demo account) and b) www.everythinglinux.com.au. In the case of everythinglinux we managed to deploy a reasonable system to cope with the workload in time but it does drive us nuts sometimes. -- ---<GRiP>--- Web: www.arcadia.au.com/gripz Answering Machine/fax: 02 4950 1194 (wait 5 mins if no answer) Mobile: 0408 686 201 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
