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The Tale of Two Sites

So here we are with just a few days left before the holidays. It’s the coldest day of the year. We’re snug inside. And we’re just a few clicks away from almost finishing our shopping online. The good news is that when online shopping goes well, it goes really, really well. But then everything has its dark side, even occasionally The Three Tomatoes. Which brings to mind that old poem about the little girl with a curl, and a line something like “when she was good she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid.” So gather ‘round the fireplace tomatoes, with a hot toddy in hand (spiked with your favorite spirit of choice, of course), and we’ll tell you the “Tale of Two Sites”, starting with the horrid one first.

Online Story #1: We prided ourselves a few days ago on completing a whole bunch of gift shopping at barnesandnoble.com for hard to shop for gifts like client gifts, fill in gifts for family, and those “thoughtful little” gifts you exchange with pals -- basically all those "what to get gifts" you wrack your brain for days thinking about. So we spent some time browsing through the barnesandnoble.com web site, found the perfect gifts, and hit the “complete order now” button. One of B&N’s benefits for Manhattanites, is that most of the time they can deliver your order the same day, with free shipping to boot. (Another reason we love NYC…nearly every one will deliver to our doorstep in a New York minute.) So having never encountered a problem before, we were confident that our gifts would arrive in a day or so. A week later we were still waiting and now panicking because the client meeting where we were to give our gifts was fast approaching. And then, just in the nick of time, or so we thought, the box arrived. Unfortunately, it contained someone else’s order -- some poor woman in Missouri who’s now stressing like we are. So first thing we did was send an email. That produced an auto response acknowledging receipt of our email and a promise to respond in 48-72 hours. We then placed the dreaded 800# call, navigated our way through the automated response system which took us two calls to figure out how to get to a live person, and then waited on hold. Finally we were connected to a customer service person to whom we explained our plight. “No problem,” the nice polite man said, “Just place the return tag on the box and drop it off at your nearest post office and we’ll credit your account.” To which we said, “Problem…first, you will pick up this wrong order you sent us in our lobby. And second, we don’t want a credit, we want what we ordered and we want it now.” “Problem,” said he, “it will take 3-4 days to get your order out.” What about ‘Fed Ex” said we, to which he politely said, “3-4 days”. So, we did what any self-respecting tomato would do, and politely said, “No problem”, cancelled our order and clicked over to amazon.com to duplicate our shopping list. Or so, we thought. First there were several items that are “no longer available”, and others that can’t be guaranteed for shipment prior to the holidays, unless of course, we overnight them. Which or course out of desperation, we did. So, we have now squandered our entire morning, are short on gifts, and have shipping charges that nearly equal our purchase price for which we will incur even more charges when we have to messenger them around town to get to clients and others before the 25th. Our only solice is that we have done this from the comfort of our keyboard rather than in some overcrowded department store standing in a customer service line.

Online story #2: Which brings us to the good side of online shopping, when customer service works right—this time when we screwed up. Several weeks ago, The Three Tomatoes ordered tickets online from ticketmaster.com for the Radio City Christmas Show. We promptly got an email back with tickets attached, which we flagged as important to remind ourselves to take a couple of minutes to print them out. Well you know how that goes. We don’t actually pay attention to those little red flags in our email inboxes, because we pretty much have everything in our inbox flagged for follow-up. So two days before the show, we remembered that we had to print out tickets, only to discover to our horror that we had inadvertently deleted the email. It’s that moment of time when you really wish you could blame this colossal goof on someone else (like your husband) because you can’t actually accept the fact that you could have done something that dumb. Fortunately though, we had saved our confirmation. We then proceeded to the customer service section of the Ticketmaster web site where we found a pull down menu with a selection of problems, which low and behold, included “lost or never received my e-tickets”. (Guess we’re not the only ones to have hit the delete key.) We filled in the key blanks, hit the send button and in about two hours received another email with our e-tickets. Thank you Ticketmaster.com because we don’t know how we were going to explain to two little girls who had been anticipating this event, that looking at the tree and watching the ice skaters at Rock, is just as exciting as seeing the Rockettes and Santa at the Christmas Show would have been. That was a close one!

And despite our Barnes and Noble set back (which to be fair is the first problem we’ve ever encountered with them), we do love the convenience of shopping anytime we want, where we want, with unlimited choices. Hey, you can't shop and drink a Martini at the same time in Macys. And there’s still time to do holiday shopping online so see our sidebar with a few more gift suggestions.