Let’s start with a tale of great hope. And we’ll preface the tale by saying that not all hopes were dashed. The overall experience was a positive one.

As I did last year, this year I had planned to do as much holiday shopping online as possible. I dread the notion of going to crowded malls, waiting line, sifting through stacks of items in the wrong size or color. I gleefully made my plans to avoid such situations at all cost. I would shop online!

I won’t even get into how I came to find the sites I ultimately attempted to order from. That was a combination of sources. As I began my odyssey, however, I quickly learned that it was not going to be as easy as I had hoped. Though some of the below examples are from my own online shopping experience, I also gathered stories from others who encountered problems. These are our tales of woe.

Forced Account Set-Ups

When I frequent a site, I have no qualms setting up an account with that site. It allows me to expedite my future orders which makes shopping on that site more convenient. But at holiday time when I’m usually shopping for others, I may visit a site one time and never plan to shop there again. In those circumstances, I do not want to be forced to set up any kind of account let alone one that collects all sorts of personal data about me. Nor does it make sense for a site to offer selling features that one can only benefit from if one is a registered user. One site offered a great idea, an “Ask a Question” feature, that’s perfect for the browsing customer, but the site only allowed you to use this feature upon logging in. Wait a minute — what if my question was about the registration process??

Sites that do not give their shoppers the option to shop as a guest risk losing shoppers altogether. I know on more than one occasion I took my business elsewhere if given a choice. Online retailers should take measures to offer guest shopping or, at the very least, remove the forced account registration during their peak shopping seasons.

Unsatisfactory Gift-Giving

This was probably the single biggest sore spot in this year’s online holiday shopping. While sites were quick to promote themselves as “gift central,” many were ill-equipped to really facilitate gift-giving in its truest form. What shoppers expect when they order an item as a gift is not just differences in bill to/ship to addresses. They want:

• to be able to order anything and have it sent as a gift
• a gift center or gift guides to help generate ideas
• gift certificate/gift card options that the recipient can redeem online or off-line
• gift wrapping (preferably free, but inevitably not)
• gift message enclosed with the gift
• packing slips free from pricing information
• control over delivery, e.g. delayed shipping dates/entering in “to arrive by” dates, split delivery locations
• estimates on shipping costs in advance (this is done in catalogs; why can’t it be done online?)
• multiple methods of returning/exchanging merchandise
• detailed answers to gift buying questions in the FAQs section
• call-in customer service telephone #’s with seven-day-a-week service during peak holiday shopping season

The best sites provided these services seamlessly; the worst left their consumers absolutely guessing. One site, Modells’, idea of gift giving was nothing more than shipping to another address, and its FAQ section did nothing to appease the worried buyer who might have wondered what the packing slip might say.

Another site, Blusphere, could enclose a gift message when you ordered online but try calling in an order and that option went bye-bye. (Though a brave Blusphere customer service rep attempted to email the gift message to the shipping department to enclose along with the gift, the buyer still did not know if that gift card made it in the package.)

One buyer at the web site Audible.com had an incredibly frustrating experience ordering a gift subscription the site offered. The site had a promotional special: order a year’s subscription and get $100 off an MP3 player at the same time, but the site could really not facilitate the gift-giving process. You could order it for yourself (in which case all the order notification emails go to you, the subscriber, immediately) but not as a gift for someone else in which the email notification went out to the gift recipient at a scheduled delay.

And though the site did ask, “When should we send the gift?” it didn’t account for the fact that the deal was really a two-part gift. What if the buyer wanted to receive the MP3 player in advance so s/he could wrap it but not to have the subscription email notification go out until the actual holiday. If you chose the delayed holiday date to accommodate the email notification, the site said both gifts would be shipped on December 25th. Nor did the site think to include a gift card or message about the forthcoming gift subscription when it shipped the MP3 player. Its FAQ section didn’t address how to handle this situation and since the order was being placed on a Saturday, there was no one in customer service to help the buyer figure it all out.

Failing/Cumbersome/Illogical Order & Fulfillment Processes

In ordinary circumstances, the consumer who finds the online ordering process overly cumbersome or confusing may quickly abandon ship. At holiday time, however, consumers probably have more patience…but that doesn’t mean the process is any more pleasant for them.

For example, a customer of Harry and David tried to buy over $300 worth of gift baskets and something went wrong in the checkout. This purchaser called customer service and were then told that customer service wouldn’t know if the order actually entered their system until three days from then. Needless to say, the purchaser panicked about their gifts ever arriving.

The experience that took the cake for me was ordering through Spiegels.com. I thought my order would be simple: I just wanted to purchase gift certificates. I wanted to order multiple quantities of the same denomination and more than one order, as I was going to ship to two different addresses. My problems? First of all, I couldn’t simply enter the denomination of the gift certificate amount I wanted to purchase. So, ok, I purchased two separate gift certificates that added up to the total I wanted to buy — not such a big deal, I thought.

The problem was that I could not simply order “quantity = 2 of the $100 gift certificate; quantity = 2 of the $50 gift certificate,” for example. With each individual denomination, I had to add it to my cart and then navigate back to the home page (the only place on the site I could find the gift certificate offered) and start all over again. I ended up having to do this four separate times. Like I said, my patience is higher during the holiday season.

For none of these certificates could I enter a date for delivery, and I could not enter any gift message. When the first order shipped, it arrived early in a non-descript package. The recipient opened it right away not realizing that it was a gift (Bad #1). Worse still, only one gift certificate arrived; the other was (get this) ON BACK ORDER! (Huge Bad #2) How in the world a gift certificate could be on back order is beyond me. When the back-ordered gift certificate arrived, it came packed in the same non-descript envelope, which included another of the same print catalog as was mailed with the first — what a waste.

Having had this first experience, I called Spiegels about the second order of multiple gift certificates, thinking I would do them a favor. After all, print catalogs are not inexpensive. I told the rep that I did not need seven separate catalogs since I was really only ordering for four individuals. I was told that the gift certificates came pre-packed this way (one per package) and that there was nothing they could do. So Spiegels was not only wasting paper but also postage, since all these pre-made packages were being mailed individually. How ridiculous!! This also forced me to have to unpack and re-pack everything because of the denominations of the gifts I wanted to give out. Total yuck!

Winners

In all fairness, online holiday shopping was not a complete abysmal failure, and, as the statistics showed, there was more online shopping done this holiday season than ever before (up ~25% from last year). There were even a few merchants lauded by my respondents for their ease of purchase. These included Williams-Sonoma, Coldwater Creek and Winter Silks, which not only had a beautiful ordering process, but had a full opt-out process upon check-out, including the option to not have even the order confirmation emailed to you. For some, this was a real dream.

Fixes & Recommendations

Since I think it’s never fair to complain about something without trying to find solutions to fix the problem, here are some possible solutions to the horrors we shoppers encountered:

• Don’t promote yourself as a gift-giving site if you’re not fully prepared or technically capable of truly selling and fulfilling gift orders. You’ll just piss off your customers.
• If you do promote gift-giving, all purchase options should be able to be also offered as a gift and the purchaser should be able to indicate the difference, e.g. “buying as a gift for someone else”.
• In general, improve the gift giving process. We consumers like the directions in which you’re moving, but we’re probably more critical of the online purchasing process than the off-line one. Keep refining this process with each passing big buying season (the next of which is Valentine’s Day for many retailers).
• Don’t force account registration. Allow a visitor to shop as a guest.
• Think through and pre-load your FAQ section with answers to the unique kinds of questions gifting creates, especially when you offer special deals or electronic delivery vs. physical delivery.
• Explain the shipping options and costs in advance. There’s nothing worse than going through the whole browsing and shopping cart process only to get to the shipping section and learn that it costs as much to ship your gift as it does to buy it. When that sort of thing happens, I typically abandon my order.
• Have an integrated back-end system — if your orders are not entered into your system in real-time, it’s really hard for customer service to help online shoppers who call in for help after they’ve placed an order. And off-line orders should offer the same features as online ordering wherever possible (and vice-versa), special pricing excluded.
• Get extra customer service help during the holidays, especially on the weekend. If you’re a small site, this may be tough but after-hours and weekends are when a lot of online buyers are shopping. You have to have someone to service them — period.

More and more people (particularly the more discerning women shoppers) are shopping online than ever before. The opportunities for sales growth are huge and etailers are making tremendous strides with each passing year. With continued attention and refinement, the online channel for retailing will only continue to grow.

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