Well hey! Love when I can learn something new, thanks!
I have found that a very effective way to get a discount for a new service/online store is to put something in the cart, add email/mailing address, go all the way up to the step of putting in a credit card, then just do nothing for a few days. Their customer retention scripts will send out an email with a discount code.
I’ve come across it a couple of times; at least once it was a clothing site. I don’t know whether they were demanding payment details; I only got as far as discovering one had to create an account in order to browse. Nope. I don’t know whether I want to create an account before I find out what you’re selling and what it costs, and I ain’t gonna do so unless I actually want to buy something. (And sometimes not then; I’ll often check out as ‘guest’ if that’s an option.)
I can’t blame them for insisting on an account before they let you do that. And are they expected to hold the item for you for six months, not knowing whether you’ll ever buy it or not, when stock is low and somebody else wants to buy it? I think you at least need to shrug and take it in stride if, when you finally place the order, half the stuff shows up as ‘sold out’ even if it wasn’t sold out when you put it in the card.
Holy Crap, I never knew that. That is a cool feature.
There are a lot of people who don’t do FB, many of them are Android users. I’m not in the total luddite grouping.
Perhaps from their perspective, Facebook shunning Android users might as well be Luddites.
Even more than shopping, all of those websites that want you to sign up even before you can see what’s on their website like Pinterest. Yes I know you can login through facebook or Google now but that wasn’t always the case.
Heavens, yes. Pinterest and Instagram. That’s just an immediate nope on out when I can’t even look at the content that other people uploaded without a site account.
I’d say there’s no reason they need to hold anything on their side. Just use a cookie that keeps items in your cart. Sure, if the item goes out of stock in the meantime, there’s nothing that can be done.
The main reason not to do this would be privacy related, if someone else uses the same device. But, if you’re sharing a computer, you could always just as easily check the history. And, if you delete the history or use private mode, it should delete the cookie as well.
My guess is just that this just isn’t a very desired featue for most people.
Like everyone else, I’m not doing that. Heck, I don’t have to sign up for a pizza hut account and the cookie they place keeps my delivery info just fine without an account. The only thing I have to enter when ordering online is my payment info.
My best guess is that anyone who has that policy doesn’t really want to be selling stuff for the most part
The client for whom I web development requires you to create an account to get pricing. But they are strictly B2B. It seems to be an industry standard for them to hide pricing, so competitors can’t just get a quick “price check.”
But consumer sites? Requiring payment info? Big NOPE from me.
What companies? I’ve left things in carts and while I’ve gotten “don’t forget X!” reminder emails from several companies, not a single one has offered me a discount.
As far as I’m concerned, Facebook-only login just means they want personal info more than they want customers/users. I’ve never seen a legit site that didn’t also have an option to use a site login. They just put it below the other login options, without the flashy graphics.
I don’t mind at all, I don’t expect the fact that I have added to my cart to act as a permanent hold, preventing others from buying. I just want to know what it was I wanted in the first place, perfaps I will buy it elsewhere.
Ah. OK, that makes sense.
If I was buying for a business, it wouldn’t be nearly as much as a problem. I imagine we’d have a pretty good sense of what was available, and what we’d pay, and the account created would be tied to the business, not our personal details.
I’d be much less worried about another business having information about “Big Bob’s Discount Dildos”, because I’d also be advertising all that to my customers looking for inexpensive sex toys. Nothing about that tells them anything about me, the person. For example, I wouldn’t have to worry about them finding out that Big Bob is actually not all that big, and not named Bob.
The other one (usually B2B as well) that bugs me is when the item I’m looking for says “Call For Pricing”. Now, it’s one thing if the items has so many different ways of being configured that it would be complicated to be done online. But, if I can find the exact same thing on a dozen other websites, I assume their product is going to be considerably more expensive. And I usually only see this for things that are expensive to begin with.
Some websites will offer you a discount in those cases, but those are few and far between. The rest and just obnoxious reminders. I’ve taken to replying to the email telling them to stop doing that. They, as you’d assume, reply that it’s just an automated response and if I don’t want the emails I need to empty my shopping cart. I’ll usually argue with them back and forth for a little while. I assume the more people that do that, the more likely the CS drones are to put pressure on TPTB to turn that ‘feature’ off. There’s a lot of times I add stuff to my cart with no intention of buying it until a later date. I don’t need a reminder about it 20 minutes after I leave the site.
IIRC, one of the replies I got mentioned something about their inventory control. Naturally I added dozens of everything to my cart, especially things they were low on stock in. Fuck 'em.
This is somewhat similar to car dealerships. If they get your address, they’re going to send you junk. Period. I know there’s an unsubscribe button, but I refuse to use that. I email them back and tell them to take me off the list. They’ll tell me to use the unsubscribe button, but I’ll tell them that I didn’t subscribe, so every time they email me, I’m going to do this. I’ve found that if I can gather a handful of email address, especially if I can get the GMs address and barrage them with multiple emails every single day, it eventually stops. The risk, however, is that even if they, in good faith, take you off the list, just the fact that you’ve emailed them adds you back to it.
My tolerance for wanting my personal information is dependent on how niche and nerdy the online store is. A random general merchandise site perceived as having thousands or millions of customers may well be trying to also collect their customer’s personal data to sell to the highest bidder. However, the tiny sites that sell me things like used Heroclix miniatures for 37 cents apiece can be as quirky as heck, and I will still take a chance on them. My fear isn’t that they are raking in millions by scamming people or selling my info to some marketing megacorporation, it’s that they will inevitably go out of business for lack of customers. I have been quite impressed by the order fulfillment speed and customer service quality at some little sites, although a few of them have evaporated when the owner gets another job or their one employee goes on maternity leave.
Heck! Let those little niche sites sell my info! I would far rather have my targeted ads on FaceBook show me Spider-Man plushies and D&D books, instead of Cadillacs, Kardashians, and erectile dysfunction pills!
No reason to sell only to the highest bidder. They can sell it to anyone who wants it since it’s not a physical thing they’re giving away.
Not entirely. A small mom and pop store is likely just using a site builder like Wix. A lot of decisions aren’t justified by the store so much as decided by the site builder or in many cases, the person designing the site doesn’t know how to make the change or doesn’t even know that they’ve done something that’s impacting the customer in a negative way.
Hmm. The only one I remember for sure was a wine-by-mail subscription thing, but it’s happened a few times.
I can’t think of a good way to search my mail to find the others. All the words that might be in that email are in tons of marketing stuff.
Note that I’ve only ever gotten it as a new customer. I wouldn’t expect it to work more than once per merchant.