It’s 2011. Pretty much every business that’s bigger than a Mom & Pop store should have figured out how to do business on the Internet by now, right?
Wrong. The Philadelphia Inquirer decided to offer a discounted Android tablet with online subscriptions. Okay - not a horrible idea.
So, when you go to their site and click on the offer, you, someone who is Internet-savvy enough to want an online newspaper and a tablet, are presented with the only way to order this deal -by being forced to call to order one. :smack:
What other companies just can’t get the hang of Internet commerce?
We’ve been doing home remodelling lately and the websites of hardware/lumber companies are all bad. Large and small.
One local company’s website is just ~4 pages of minimal info. I went to copy and paste their address from the top of the homepage so I could map it. (No Google maps page on their site, of course.) It was a graphic! Not text.
Looking for stuff via Google turns up a lot of links to Lowes. But clicking on any of those links turns into a search expire/not found sort of thing at Lowes. (A lot of sites even deliberately botch Google’s links to internal pages.) And since their own site search is horrible, you’re stuck. Can’t use their search, can’t use Google’s site search.
Home Depot: Searching is nearly as bad as Lowes. Searched for a particular item. Not found. Searched for it via Google’s site search. Found at several stores in my area. Just not the closest one. Oh, Home Depot is only returning stuff at my local store. Not exactly helpful.
Went to Home Depot’s web site to find out what tools they rent. A few things listed and implied they rent more. But no complete listing. There’s even an FAQ with the question “What tools do you rent?” But the answer lists two items: e.g., from A to B.
If you know enough to include something in an FAQ, why don’t you actually answer the FAQ?
The local chapter of my professional organization doesn’t take online registration or payment for workshops. You have to print out the registration form and mail it with a check. I thought this was unbelievably outdated when I first encountered it in 2004 or so and they’re still doing it.
I worked as a manager at an assisted living facility from 2002 to 2007. We did absolutely nothing electronically. The facility was owned and operated by a big corporation that had several hundred facilities throughout the country, but apparently they didn’t believe in conducting business using 21st century models. Or 20th century models, for that matter. Some examples:
All resident charts and service plans were hand-written. There were perhaps six or eight different fax cover sheets that were pre-printed from corporate, the rest we did by hand.
There was two computers in the facility and neither one was connected to the internet. All communication with other businesses, corporate, etc. was done with fax or phone.
If we had to write a memo to a Dr. about something, we did it on a goddamn typewriter. No shit. An old IBM selectric, with the spinning ball. That was lots of fun, because a lot of the med-aides had literally never seen a typewriter before and didn’t know how to use one. Most just said the hell with it and wrote them by hand, on pen and paper. Doctors routinely called the facility to bitch about our unprofessional business practices.
All inter-office communication was done by hand, on legal pads. No emails cc’d to everyone. Phone messages were likewise transcribed onto notepad paper and delivered by hand.
Everyone used a filo-fax day planner. Nothing electronic. No electronic calendars.
Because of this total lack of electronic communication and documentation, we had an absolutely astronomical amount of paper to store. Corporate wanted EVERYTHING kept. We had to buy several huge industrial file cabinets, and rented an off-site storage unit.
This particular company had to file for bankruptcy a year or two after I left. How surprising.
They want my email address. They want to start billing online, my internet service provider. Hey - it sounds crazy, but it just might work. I’ve been paying their bill online for years, but they can’t get it together to change my address and stop sending my bill to the PO Box I don’t use anymore, so** emailing** me my bill - wow - cutting edge stuff.
I would like to add the entire US banking system and it’s incredibly outmoded system of checks. 9/11 was actually a huge deal for banks because, at that time, they were still flying physical pieces of paper around the country and, when all the planes were grounded, those pieces of paper couldn’t get to where they needed to go. It took an act of congress and another 3 years before they finally figured out how to digitize checks and ship the digital images of the checks instead… where they are usually then subsequently printed out on fresh check paper to be processed.
I don’t know where you went or how you looked but there’s no FAQ on my Home Depot site and there’s a page-and-a-half of tools listed (click on Explore Rentals under Tool Rental). I have never had a problem with the HD site. (Sometimes with the store in person, but never with the site.) Same with Lowe’s. Instead of using Google why not just go to the main site (HomeDepot.com for example)?
Those businesses that can afford and/or choose to hire a professional web-building service (even if that’s just a high-school kid working at home after school), vs. a company trying to save some $$$ by doing its own web site in-house, without necessarily hiring anyone particularly skilled at web design. I can imagine lots of people/companies trying to build a DIY web site and not doing it well.
You would be well advised to read a post a bit better before responding. Note that I clearly said that I did visit both sites directly and tried their search functions, including giving a specific example. Both sites search functions return huge numbers of items for very specific searches. 99%+ are not even the same type of thing I was looking for. No easy way to find the matching thing that goes with the thing you’re looking at. Hard to determine if something is available at some store in my area. Many items have key missing specs like size or material.
As to Home Depot itself, I found things on their site via Google that their search function didn’t return using the product’s actual name. (I would then check HD for it using SKU and that would return it. So the search function does have a link to the page, just not one based on what they themselves label it.)
And under :What types of tools can I rent?" All I see is “We rent a variety of professional-quality tools ranging from smaller hand-tools to larger machinery, such as trenchers.” Not exactly a helpful answer.
The Tool Rental does list some tools, but very, very far from a complete list. (The item we ended up renting from them isn’t listed. In fact, there isn’t even a category for it.)
ftg, sorry if I misunderstood you. I wonder what you ended up renting that wasn’t listed on their site. As I said, I found their site easy to use and comprehensive. And are you saying that you went to FAQs to see what tools they rented? If so, why not go to the tool section and look? I’m not trying to be snarky, just trying to understand. I’ve seen so many web sites that were orders of magnitude worse than Home Depot or Lowes I was just surprised by your criticism.
I’ve had trouble with Home Depot’s site as well. Their iPhone “app” is - or was at the time - just a redirect to their website. I tried searching for a particular item and thought my iPhone was autocorrecting it to something else, because only a similar word was coming up. Nope, the HD site (at least on the mobile search) was displaying its “best guess” without even a little “no Xx found, did you mean Xy?” message, leaving me to fiddle around with re-entering it a couple of times until I figured out I hadn’t fat-fingered the keyboard and that autocorrect was not messing with me.
While not businesses, schools need an internet presence at least. So many schools are gawd-awful at anything computer related, internet included.
The school where I taught not only didn’t allow on-line purchasing-- until last year we had to type purchase orders on typewriters, using carbon paper. Nothing like trying to find a functioning typewriter and then playing mad scientist to refresh the ribbon.
There is no excuse-- we paid nearly 100 grand for our head IT guy. Evidently he was spending all his time screwing with the internet filters until a two minute search turned into a two week process.
A lot of funeral homes have web sites because they know they have to, but the old family-owned ones, some in business for 125-150 years, don’t have any idea what to do with them and most of the people there have no idea how to send an email.
My city just announced that you can pay your bills online! (Trash pickup, etc.) When I went to do this, I found out that what they meant was you could email them your checking account information and they’d debit your account. They won’t be set up to do credit card payments for, oh, a couple of years now.
Restaurants, especially small local ones. Many don’t have a web page at all, and others may have a page, but don’t put up menu information. I realize the menu might change, and it’s probably a good idea to leave off prices, but sometimes I want to know what they serve. This is especially true of take-out places: why on Earth would you not want your menu online?
Even when they do have a web page, they are far more likely than any other business to have it not work properly. Take a look atthis example – the menu is “coming soon” and the links at the top of the page don’t work. The page has been that way for at least a year.
Any web based store front that doesn’t have paypal as an option. I can be all set to spend money but if I am presented with a “Create an account screen” instead of a paypal button I will, 9 times out of 10, just decide that I didn’t need that widget after all.
A lot of places just make a website because ‘everyone else does’. But then they don’t commit to it. A website isn’t a Yellow Pages ad, where you put it in and forget about it until next year. It’s closer to consistent monthly ads.
There’s also the issue of budgets, which is what I see most often. Razor thin margins means you can’t pay much attention to your website and your can’t afford to hire anyone. We can train you to update your menu with Wordpress, but you need to keep that person who gets trained and make sure there’s time for them to do it, which is hard enough for local businesses.
This one has been corrected- a few months ago.
My parents run a tourist attraction, and, despite being online both at home and at work, (and having a website which they didn’t know how to update- also now maintained) and despite the fact they regularly use google maps to plan their own trips, they hadn’t put their own business on. There was a tiny, indistinct map hidden away somewhere on the website- this for somewhere that gets tens of thousands of visitors a year.
Apparently, she thought google ‘did it automatically’, and had never thought to check… Seriously Mum?
I don’t care if they don’t take PayPal as long as they let me just input a credit card number without having to create an account for that specific store.