I have some online shopping peeves. I feel as if venting them will improve my mood.
I like to put things into my online cart and then think about them. Or I put things in the cart to see if I have enough to meet the free-shipping-with-minimum-purchase or percent-off-with-minimum-purchase deal, and if I don’t, I close the tab, leaving the things in the cart—because the next time I go back, I don’t want to have to re-find all those items. EVERY TIME I DO THIS, Old Navy sends me an email a short while later saying my cart “has abandonment issues.” EVERY TIME. The first time it was mildly annoying but I could see they were trying to be cute. Now that it’s EVERY TIME, I cringe in anticipation of it. It makes me feel like clearing out my cart, forgetting everything I would have bought the next time. THAT’ll show their automatic email system!
Old Navy ALSO sends me emails telling me the GOOD NEWS that the items in my cart are ALMOST MINE, and how extremely lucky I am that I still have the opportunity to pay for them.
I know I’ve mentioned this before. I KNOW I have. But it continues to bug me. “Everything an ADDITIONAL 40% off!”—but many things STILL aren’t as much as 40% off, which doesn’t make sense math-wise. (I do get it when the things are discounted as they’re added to the cart, or when a coupon code is needed; I mean when the store claims the prices are as marked.) Children’s Place is the one I notice most with this.
“ENTIRE SITE 40% OFF!!!*” “*some exclusions apply” Children’s Place is again the one that bugs me the most often with this, but they’re definitely not the only ones. “Entire site” MEANS no exclusions. If there are exclusions, a word other than “entire” is needed, and luckily there are plenty of those.
“ENTIRE SITE UP TO 70% OFF!” That is, many things are 0% off, which counts as up to 70% off. It’s true! And incredibly annoying/misleading. CHILDREN’S PLACE.
“40% OFF YOUR ENTIRE ORDER!!!” But now the pants that have been $8.99 for the past three months are $14.99. This is a LOT of sites.
“GIANT AMAZING 40%-OFF BLOW-OUT SALE!” One item out of thirty is 40% off—and most are familiar to me as items that were on sale before the GIANT SALE. I do expect a GIANT SALE to include enough items that I don’t feel like I’m panning for gold just to find ANYTHING that’s included. If I go to the site and can’t even tell from the prices that there IS a sale, it is not sufficiently GIANT. (Also, I recommend not using a term like “blow-out” when marketing to people who change diapers.)
“Take an additional 20% off all clearance!” But now the clearance item I added to my cart last week at $11.99 is on clearance for $14.99.
Daily sale emails, especially of the “Only 3 Days Left!,” “Only 2 Days Left!,” “Last Day!,” “Hours Left!,” “Sale Extended 2 Days!,” “One Day Left of Extended Sale!,” “Hours Left of Extended Sale!,” variety. I have even WRITTEN to Lands’ End about this, they were overdoing it so hard. They never DON’T have a sale anymore. I adjusted the email frequency with them when they added that option, and that helps somewhat. I finally had to unsubscribe to Lane Bryant: I WANTED emails from them! I had REQUESTED that they market to me! But they overdid it so severely (and, at least at that time, had no option to reduce email frequency), so I finally and reluctantly asked to be taken off the list. (I filled in the “why are you leaving?” field, even though in my experience marketers BEG for customer feedback, PLEAD for customer feedback, even PAY for customer feedback—and then collect it in a box and don’t use it for anything.)
Yesterday I went looking for boots online. I didn’t add anything to a cart; just browsed prices and options. This morning I got an email from L.L. Bean thanking me for my visit and inviting me to reconsider the items I looked at, accompanied by pictures of those items. That’s creepy. I feel spied-on and followed. I expect the same PRETENSE of privacy online that I get if I go to a store in person: if I’d gone to a physical L.L. Bean store, I wouldn’t want to get a letter a few days later telling me that they’d seen me shopping there and enclosing a list of what I’d looked at in case I wanted to reconsider my decision not to buy those things.
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To say some HAPPY, NON-complainy things, I am having coffee with a friend today and really looking forward to it. And also, the sky is looking pretty. And also, See’s is having their “$5 flat-rate shipping or free shipping over $55” deal, which I find entirely satisfactory. (You can choose your shipping date, so I like to order myself some chocolates shipped for Valentine’s Day.)
Yes! See also: “Did you forget something?” and “We miss you!” emails.
YES and YES.
I hate that kind of stuff! I get around it by logging off after I make my purchase. Usually the stuff still stays in the cart and I don’t feel like my shopping trip was monitored by online spies.
But, yes, why do companies think we’re morons? Stop screwing with the prices! I’d prefer fewer sales and more honest pricing.
ME TOO. REAL sales, and WAY FEWER OF THEM.
yes, yes, one thousand times yes.
Add on: when you give to a charity and they send a thank you ASKING FOR MORE MONEY. What is that? Do people say, “oh my stars, I can see I was not nearly generous enough. Here’s more money.”
YES. Or when a charity has little check-boxes on the donation form, and they’re something like “____$10 _____$20 _____$30 ______(other)”. And then the NEXT time you donate, the boxes are “____$25 _____$50 _____$75 ______(other)”.
Or when a charity asks for a “membership renewal” and makes it sound as if you OWE the money.
Like many companies, Lands End sends catalogs with their orders. Catalogs I don’t want. I had an email exchange with a LE rep and the take away was that this was “completely out of their hands” and was the responsibility of the warehouse where they had no power. The warehouse they’ve paid to store and ship their items.
Also I hate that even if I shop exclusively online, ordering is giving some companies permission to send you catalogs. So then I gave to call and cancel again and there’s no way to mark my account?
So now I only buy LE from Sears. That’ll show them.
Also, how about companies that let you check the box and pay for expedited shipping for items that will never make it? That swimsuit we needed for a picky girl for a camp I didn’t expect to involve swimming? There’s a big difference between 2-3 days and oh hey that item is in England and won’t come for a month Mini Boden. And then telling me it was somehow my fault.
If people can’t be smarter, why can’t computer be? (This vent DID feel good!)
Uuuugh. Children’s Place. CHILDREN’S PLACE! You don’t need to send me an email every second day announcing your big amazing sale…if it is a perpetual sale, then that is your REGULAR PRICE! Rant over.
I also dislike very much when I go look at some stuff on Amazon or Macys and then go to a non shopping site (say, to read Dear Abby) and the sidebar ads are the very things I was browsing earlier. Creepy.
Yes! Ads show up on Facebook too! I feel like all sites are watching all other sites in hopes of finally getting you to click on their ads.
I hate this the most. Especially when you accidentally click on an ugly shoe and then you have to see it for a week!
The in store version of this is why I refuse to shop at Kohls. Every single item there is always on fake sale. It just irritates me.
And then their “clearance stuff” is like 75% off, but it’s off their super high retail price that nothing is ever sold at! So it’s really only like 30% off of their normal 50% off price which really isn’t a good deal for clearance stuff. Basically they just totally suck.
I used to work at a Mervyn’s (very similar department store to Kohl’s, now out of business) and the pricing structure drove me nuts. It was very rare that anything was full price, but the exact sale percentage changed all the time. If you’ve ever been the person who shows up to the store at 5 AM to change the price signs three times a week , you get suspicious of these sales very, very quickly.
I have not though of Mervyn’s in a long time, thanks for the smile :-)
YES! Children ‘s Place is the WORST. My kids wear their pajamas because they are cute and cheap. The ” regular” price varies from $8.00 to $14.95 and changes daily. When we need new pjs, I am reduced to checking their site daily to see if they finally make it to a price I am willing to pay ($6 or less once you factor in the various discounts). Honestly, I would be willing to pay more but I KNOW I’ll eventually catch them at what I consider the “good” price and I just want to beat them at their little games. It is infuriating! And kohls is just as bad!!
On Jan. 2nd I bought 2 bathing suits for my daughter because we’re going south on the 24th. The shipping was supposed to be in 10-16 days, so it should have been fine. Then I got an email with a link to track my order, which has every step of the process outlined (you buy from us, we do a big group order to get a discount, it ships to us, we repackage it and send it out to all who ordered), and is telling me my estimated ship date is January 27th!
I complained that the shipping will be 2.5x longer than the shortest estimate they gave, and still around 1.5x the longest estimate! I got a form response outlining, again, every step of their process. I responded saying I know their process, but they should be more honest/accurate with their shipping times, and they sweetly told me I could cancel my order. GAH!
This was Zulily, by the way.
Zulily has the worst, worst shipping. I wouldn’t buy anything from them unless you have a 6-8 week lead time.
I am still waiting for a Christmas present that I ordered from Zulily on December 4. After contacting them, they kindly let me know that I could cancel my order if I wasn’t happy with the sometime-but maybe-never shipping time. Lesson learned!
After getting all annoyed and contacting them and telling people about my experience, I got a notice today that my order has shipped, or at least been assigned a shipping tracking number! So it looks like they will be in in time for our trip? Maybe?
You know, it’s not the shipping time that’s the issue, it’s the communication:
Your order will ship in 10-16 days!
Thanks for buying, your shipping date is now estimated in 25 days!
You don’t like the shipping estimate changing on you? Cancel!
Your order is now shipping! At 12 days!
Now to see if it actually gets here in a reasonable amount of time. I have faith because they’re using a courier service…
Zulily is ALSO super sketchy because their “sale” prices are frequently higher than Amazon, especially with toys.
however, I do have to say that once I received fake shearling boots for my kids that were complete garbage- they were essentially slippers, but advertised as actual boots, and the bottoms were so slippery they couldn’t have used them as slippers either, and when i contacted them, they refunded my money and made a point of saying I could keep the boots. Which I did not, because they were awful. But that was nice at least.
Yes, ugh! Dear Lane Bryant: your cotton tank tops do not cost $40 in real life so please stop pretending they do during flash sales.
This probably won’t help with reducing the creep-factor, but most anyone who has any stake in their online presence uses analytics services, which means that they are using software that monitors every mouse movement and click on every page by every user and it’s associated with your username. While they’re not really interested in you personally, they are interested in conversions – getting you to buy stuff (or read stuff or share stuff or whatever else it is that they use to measure their growth and success as a business). Often they are sending out multiple versions of sale emails, or making different versions of their website pages visible to different users as large experiments in how well the wording of a sale email or the color of a button work to make conversions (sales!) with different demographics of users. Same is true for phone apps – the app developers are often monitoring every tap and swipe for functionality and conversions.
Here’s a trick my mother and I discovered with the airlines last summer, that I’m sure works for online shopping. The airlines actually monitor which flights you’re interested in and every time you use the same browser to check back to see the rate for that flight IT IS HIGHER THAN THE LAST TIME. Always. So use different browsers to check prices before you make purchases.
A lot of this stuff is coined Customer Centricity. And it’s definitely one of those strategies that I feel like can be used for good or evil by different businesses.
My biggest pet peeve is the “As Much As 70% Off, Even Clearance!”, but the Clearance ALSO includes the excluded things, like say, Everyday Steals. So you have to start looking at the description before you even look at the item. I’m LOOKING AT YOU OLD NAVY.
Oh! Yes! I’ll have a whole cart of things I’m interested, and EVERY SINGLE THING will be either a “Everyday Steal” or whatever their other term is (“Hot Deal”?)—and NONE of it a price I’d actually call a “steal”! So basically, “If we overpriced it, you can use a coupon! Otherwise: no.”
Yeah, the email thanking me for visiting even when I don’t leave anything in the cart is the most annoying to me. I get this from elf cosmetics a lot. They are also always having a GIANT 3-HOURS ONLY sale, although to be fair they are basically just giving makeup away over there a lot of the time. Oh hell, I just talked myself into checking the elf website. I swear this comment is not sponsored, I just have an online browsing problem.
As I was reading this I was thinking “Children’s Place” to myself before you even said it. But their stores are just as bad as online! Huge, giant signs proclaiming ENTIRE STORE 50% OFF! with a minuscule asterisk all “well entire but not really.”
Ann Taylor Loft is also guilty and I finally unsubscribed from them too because it’s just not worth the 45 emails about their one day, no two day, ok all weekend! sales.
Also: YES to all the ads changing to whatever you’ve looked at on Amazon (creepy, and I love Amazon)
and YES to the airlines increasing fares after you’ve checked prices a couple of times. So irritating and icky.
The part about the discounts is galling. I dislike spending so much time debunking what they say. I feel the same way about most coupons and deals; you can really spend a lot of time on saving money.
The up to percent off is one of my biggest pet peeves ever. Gymboree does “starting at $4.99!” a lot too. Sure, one pair of socks is $5 and everything else is $39.99.
How’s this for creepy. A few months ago and then again this week I logged in on the Carnival Cruise website to check prices. Both times, a few days later I got a phone call from “my personal Carnival booking agent” wanting to know if she could help me book that cruise out of New Orleans I was looking at. The first time I let it go but this second time I told her I realize she’s just sitting at her desk doing what she was hired to do but if it happened again I would not be cruising with Carnival again.
Does your browser allow incognito mode? It’s basically a setting that allows you to visit websites without adding them to your history. It should help with the “Did you forget something?” emails and the personalized ads, since your computer won’t “remember” that you looked at those items. (Not sure if it works when you add things to your cart, though.)
Was going to say the same thing! If you’re pretty sure you’re just browsing, go incognito.
Ha! This post makes me very glad I don’t do more online shopping. I usually head to Amazon or Ebay and if I can’t get it there (and really, what are the chances), I don’t get it.
If I do go nuts and buy something somewhere else, I tell my yahoo account, which is used only for those transactions, that anything from e.g. Kohl’s should be considered spam. That works pretty well, actually — there’s lots I don’t like about yahoo mail, but it mostly puts emails from senders I’ve tagged as spammers, in spam. Of course I guess I could set up filters in my gmail account too.
My online peeve is getting ads for things I just bought on non-shopping sites. It doesn’t bother me so much if I’ve only looked at the item. It’s a good reminder of how little privacy we have online, but if I’m shopping for boots and don’t buy any, at least it’s still possibly true that I’m in the market for boots. But when I just bought the boots? You really can’t extend your advertising algorithms to block out items that have been purchased already?
I also don’t like Amazon’s “Buy It Again” feature, where a window will periodically pop up featuring something I purchased over a year ago and invite me to buy it again. These aren’t, like, subscribe and save items that I might need to restock. Do they really think I need another copy of “Bear Says Thanks?”
But Children’s Place holds a special place in the cold, dead part of my heart (formerly reserved for Kohls and its confusing way of sending you three promising coupons at a time, only one of which can be used without a Kohls card) because of the time I dashed in there during a “50 percent off store-wide” sale while my husband waited patiently with the kiddos out in the mall, tore through the various shirts, pants, and PJs I was trying stock up on, rang up $150 worth of stuff, and found out they wouldn’t take my 20% coupon because their *store-wide sale* counted as a conflicting offer. In. What. Universe?! Certainly not Calvin Klein’s or Neiman Marcus’s, both of whom honored my husband’s coupons on their sale-priced items the exact same day. I haven’t gone back since, despite needing spring pajamas for the girls. Grrr.
Yes, Children’s Place. So. Many. Emails. Thankfully Gmail filters them out and they all go to my Promotions folder and are much easier to ignore. Also, not quite an online shopping peeve, but at Kohls everything is always on sale…except for the special week when you can spend your Kohl’s Cash, then everything is up in price. Why must you do this? Oh yeah, because you know people are going to come spend their Kohl’s cash and you hope they won’t notice the price hike because they are spending “free money”. Nope.
On a positive note, often at ThinkGeek.com, if you put stuff in your cart and leave it, they will email you with a coupon to try to get you to purchase the stuff. It is usually a %off if you spend so much ($50 or $60) so doesn’t work if you only want one thing, but works perfectly if you are making a larger purchase.
I had to come back and note that today I was browsing a very practical, non-enticing website (Vitacost) before doing my regular banner-ad-infested internet reading, and now the banners are just reminding me to take my vitamins and drink some tea and I kind of like it.
Swistle, i have not had a chance to read all of the comments so if someone has already addressed this, i apologize. A friend told me recently that if you shop at regular websites and they have your information stored (in cookies and other such tech-ways), they give you certain (read: higher) prices, but if you open a private search browser (I’m not sure how to do this), you will find different (read: lower) prices. WHAT??? This BLOWS my mind.
I’ve heard that this is true for airline tickets, but I don’t think most online retailers do that. Who knows, though! To open a private window in Chrome, click the three lines to the right of the address bar and select “New Incognito Window” or press shift+command+N. I’m not sure how to do it in other browsers, though.
K. Here’s how you avoid them following you (but doesn’t work if you want to leave things in a cart)
A) SIGN OUT. Seriously. SIGN OUT. Of everything, especially facebook, google, and Amazon.
B) Delete cookies.
C) Browse. You can bookmark things for yourself if you want.
D) Delete cookies again.
Every time you go into FB, google, amazon, whatevs. Sign out when you’re done. This is a do as I say not as I do recommendation, but it does work to limit the Big Brother effect.
Wayfair and Hayneedle ads pop up on FB and in Gmail and around the web when I’ve been browsing on their site. Super creepy to see the rug I was just considering looking back at me on FB. :/