Peet’s Coffee & Tea is a coffee roaster out of San Francisco area that also does mail order coffee beans via a website. I’ve been a customer of theirs for a couple years, getting resupplied every three weeks. It wasn’t cheap and certainly fell into the luxury category, but I enjoy the fresh beans and the coffee brewed with them. (I do feel compelled to justify this by saying it’s still cheaper than a daily visits to the local coffee shop.)
Anyway, I had built up a bit of a bean supply and was going to be traveling for a week which would further increase the surplus. I figured I’d skip the next shipment which should keep me on track. Unfortunately when I went into “Manage Individual Shipments” on their website and deleted the order I was presented with a message that made it sound like all future shipments would also be cancelled. I figured, “that can’t be right, I’m managing an individual shipment. And if it is, oh well.” Oh well, it was right. All future orders were deleted.
Now, I could have gone in and set up the recurring delivery all over, but “in these trying economic times” (drink!) I was already considering cancelling. This just cinched it. There’s other coffee (even Peet’s at the local grocery store – just not roasted days before I get it). Because of Peet’s website design instead of deciding if I should cancel (and give something up) they turned the decision into whether I should sign up (and give up my money) and that tipped the balance just enough to keep me away.
Now maybe I could have changed the delivery date or something as easy and maybe I missed it. But in my mind I wanted to cancel one specific delivery and I was in the management screen for that one specific delivery.
I had another experience over a year ago with Target stores. I used to check their advertising circular online every Sunday. There would frequently be things I wanted (maybe three out of 4 weeks) so I’d stop by during the week and get those and a few other things.
Then they changed their website and the circular webpage became unusable. Some web designer or manager say that Flash was big on the web so they designed this graphic intensive web page that was unusable even on broadband (slow broadband at that time, but still broadband). I stopped checking the website after about a month and stopped visiting the store so frequently. Now it’s once every couple of months. Even though they’ve fixed the website I’m out of the habit and haven’t felt compelled to change.
These aren’t cases of bad web design failing to attract customers. They’re cases where bad web design drove away existing customers. (Well, at least one existing customer.)
Bad Web Design = Lost Customer
Peet’s Coffee & Tea is a coffee roaster out of San Francisco area that also does mail order coffee beans via a website. I’ve been a customer of theirs for a couple years, getting resupplied every three weeks. It wasn’t cheap and certainly fell into the luxury category, but I enjoy the fresh beans and the coffee brewed with them. (I do feel compelled to justify this by saying it’s still cheaper than a daily visits to the local coffee shop.)
Anyway, I had built up a bit of a bean supply and was going to be traveling for a week which would further increase the surplus. I figured I’d skip the next shipment which should keep me on track. Unfortunately when I went into “Manage Individual Shipments” on their website and deleted the order I was presented with a message that made it sound like all future shipments would also be cancelled. I figured, “that can’t be right, I’m managing an individual shipment. And if it is, oh well.” Oh well, it was right. All future orders were deleted.
Now, I could have gone in and set up the recurring delivery all over, but “in these trying economic times” (drink!) I was already considering cancelling. This just cinched it. There’s other coffee (even Peet’s at the local grocery store – just not roasted days before I get it). Because of Peet’s website design instead of deciding if I should cancel (and give something up) they turned the decision into whether I should sign up (and give up my money) and that tipped the balance just enough to keep me away.
Now maybe I could have changed the delivery date or something as easy and maybe I missed it. But in my mind I wanted to cancel one specific delivery and I was in the management screen for that one specific delivery.
I had another experience over a year ago with Target stores. I used to check their advertising circular online every Sunday. There would frequently be things I wanted (maybe three out of 4 weeks) so I’d stop by during the week and get those and a few other things.
Then they changed their website and the circular webpage became unusable. Some web designer or manager say that Flash was big on the web so they designed this graphic intensive web page that was unusable even on broadband (slow broadband at that time, but still broadband). I stopped checking the website after about a month and stopped visiting the store so frequently. Now it’s once every couple of months. Even though they’ve fixed the website I’m out of the habit and haven’t felt compelled to change.
These aren’t cases of bad web design failing to attract customers. They’re cases where bad web design drove away existing customers. (Well, at least one existing customer.)
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