On Christmas Eve Future Shop started their online boxing week sale. They had a few good deals but otherwise their sales were about on-par with the regular price of Canada Computers. I still don’t understand why anyone that lives in the same city as a Canada Computers would buy anything related to computers from Future Shop but that’s another story…
Anyway, I was interested in buying the Canon Rebel XT from them which was on sale for 399. I’ve always wanted a digital SLR so I figured this would be a cheap way to get into them. The website went down for a few hours “to prepare” for the boxing week sale store. First of all, it’s pretty sad that they actually had to take down their site for hours to do that. It should be a matter of a flick of a switch but somehow they have managed to translate the real-world physical constraints of a brick and mortar shop and let it manifest in an online virtual shop. I’m surprised you don’t have to go back to the home page to “leave” the online store.
The site was then back up at 7 pm in “preview” mode to let people check out the sales before the mad rush began. The sales were set to begin at 8 pm. In anticipation of some rush I pre-created an account and made sure I was already logged in.
Just as 8 pm rolled around I added the camera and an SD card to my cart and proceeded to checkout. I was brought to a checkout “queue” screen where I had to wait in line to check out. Lovely attention to detail I must say, as it was quite like being in an actual store. Although I was rather disappointed that there weren’t any impulse buy items for me to throw into my cart as I waited in line. A minor detail that I’m sure will be remedied in future versions of their online store.
Wait a minute, let’s get serious. How ridiculous is this. It’s an ONLINE STORE. WHY AM I WAITING IN LINE. The bonus feature of this setup was that although I was waiting in line to check out, I didn’t actually have possession of the item(s)! The lovely screen warned me that once I proceeded to the next step of the checkout process, that some of my items may no longer be available. Oh sweet. So this is where they notify me of how utterly useless their “quantity remaining” detail on their product info page is. Cuz you know, some sort of ticket system whereby you get a product allocated for you while you wait in checkout is simply too difficult to implement.
The technical answer as to why they would implement such a asinine procedure is most probably that their checkout servers couldn’t handle that sort of volume at once. Ironically (I’ll get to this soon), they could easily have used something like Amazon’s EC2 or some other type of temporary computing environment to handle large spikes in traffic, as would be expected during a boxing week sale.
Back to my checkout story now. So after about an hour or so of waiting it finally told me I was ready to proceed to the next page. I clicked on the button to proceed. I was staring at the product page for a 500 gb hd. That’s right. A product page. How did I get there? I don’t know. I clicked back and it brought me back to the proceed to checkout screen. Clicked next. Back to the 500 gb hd. Right, that clearly makes sense.
At this point the items were also no longer in my cart so I had to go back and add them again. As I went back to lineup to checkout again, it told me the website was down. It couldn’t handle the load.
I waited 2-3 hours.
The site came back online and I repeated all the steps and waited another 45 minutes in the queue. There were 1000 cameras at 8 pm. There were less than 300 now. I finally got the go-ahead to proceed beyond the checkout queue again. Now it told me I wasn’t logged in. Yes I was. But not anymore. Their website clearly has problems with session management. Over the next 15 minutes I had to log back in about 6 times and hit the back button about 4-5 times to escape from blank screens but I finally made it to the point where I could enter my shipping info.
The next screen just blew my mind. It asked me how I wanted it shipped. It gave me two options: Ground (14.98) and Air (13.25). Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that they’re actually charging me for shipping. Their distribution centre is somewhere in the GTA. And they want to fly it to me. In Belleville. Well, I guess there are some regional flights that flight into/out of Trenton. Maybe that’s how it works. No wait, maybe it’s just that total idiots designed this website. Why Air is cheaper than Ground is a mystery to me. Why they don’t even tell me what the hell Ground vs. Air means is a mystery to me. Why they don’t tell me which is faster is a mystery to me.
I think the Future Shop team should try ordering from Amazon for once. Not only is it free shipping for orders over $39, but it also tells me how long it takes (1-2 business days) and it also gives me the option of paying for express shipping and yes, it tells me how long I should expect to wait.
So after selecting Air (It was cheaper. I actually did try to figure out whether Ground or Air would be faster but I could not come to a solid conclusion) I finally got to enter my credit card info. Oh yeah, had to log back in again. As I reached the climax of my purchasing journey I was ushered over to Visa so I could sign up for Verified by Visa. Talk about killing the mood. Now without ranting on too long about Verified by Visa, let’s just say it’s the most useless and annoying “feature” ever. The entire system was conceived to protect the retailers and certainly not to improve the user experience. They spin it as more “secure” but all it does is create a hassle. Now I can understand if some smaller e-tailer wants to implement this to reduce charge appeals but a large company like Future Shop should be most concerned with driving sales through fast with a minimum of obstacles. Amazon knows this.
Already so committed at this point, I trudged through and clicked the final button. And then it took me to a white screen with a simple message saying “An error occurred sending the VBV data”. Cool. Thank you for wasting the last 3 hours of my life.
I did have one more chance at it but as I stared at the credit card page I decided that I would not go through with this. I can live without the camera for now.
So what’s the conclusion of this long story? Well for starters, once Amazon expands their selection of goods at amazon.ca, Future Shop doesn’t stand a chance in the online world. Much more importantly, their business in the real world will die a slow death. Evolve or become obsolete.
The fundamental problem with Future Shop/Best Buy is that they are a traditional brick and mortar store that are used to making killer profits through insane margins. They have done well. But with mass adoption of the internet there has been a paradigm shift. It has only begun and we are only now reaching the tipping point. We are reaching a level of near-perfect competition now that geographical barriers have been all but eliminated. In order to survive this new age of internet consumption, they need to drastically improve their online experience.
I do not think that it will happen anytime soon. They are a brick and mortar retailer. They think and act like one. In contrast, Amazon is a technology company. Future Shop hires teenagers to peddle their wares. Amazon hires programmers. Future Shop most likely outsources their website development. Amazon is innovating the latest web technologies.
Best Buy’s only hope of survival is to leverage the Best Buy and Future Shop brands and partner with Amazon just like Toys R Us has already. That’s their only saving grace.
