Spent a little bit of time to order some personalized gifts today – online. Easy-peasy, right? No and believe me, it was even more complicated as it went…and shockingly so.

How hard can it be these days to order online?

• Choose item
• Select color
• Add name (or names)

No problem, right? 20% off – order today – free shipping.

and, it was easy, up until the point where I logged in, updated my credit card on file and was verifying the order in the shopping cart…

…when I found out I (somehow) had 2 of the exact same item in my cart.

• A glitch?
• User error?

Whatever, the reason, easily corrected… Just delete one. From the cart. Put it “back” in the virtual world, no one is hurt, no re-stocking, just click, and poof it is gone.

Nope…not here you can’t. Trying to “go back” to the online catalog then emptied my cart. 0 items where 6 were mere moments ago. I called customer service to see if they could help, but alas, they said it couldn’t be done. I would have to start over. I didn’t believe her. Searching history, I found my “6-item-cart” – I figured, I’d just order it and call them back to have them append the order. Which I did.

Except that it pretty much deleted the entire order and my rep had to re-enter every single item.

“Believe me“, is what the first woman on the phone said. Clearly, I didn’t believe her. How could their system have been designed that way?  Or, and more to the point, even if it had been designed that way originally, like 20 years ago when online shopping became possible, that it had not been corrected by now?

~ Dawn aka Hat Girl