It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

YEAH, I KNOW, depressing thought. But yesterday was Thanksgiving, and that means today is the more or less official start of the Christmas shopping season. (At least in the US. In the UK, as far as I can tell, it started back in July. That's what happens when you don't have fall holidays.) It therefore seems like a good moment to bitch about ecommerce sites.

For example: the Lawn Tennis Association (http://www.lta.org.uk) runs a little online store from which you can outfit your local tennis player. LTA members get a 20% discount. You enter your membership number and the prices automatically reduce. The service is terrific - I ordered a three-racquet tennis bag on Sunday, and it arrived on Tuesday. But the discount wasn't applied, and no one answers email to either the third-party shop's "customer care" or the LTA's Webmaster. Do I have to complain to Barclaycard? The LTA shop also blobbed its copybook by sending out the shipment confirmation in HTML so dense it was unreadable by anyone who sensibly has their email software set to display only text.

Then there's "There is currently no way to opt out of the HTML format" eBay UK (http://www.ebay.co.uk). I've had a lot of fun buying second-hand DVDs off the service for the last year. This week, I discover that they've unilaterally decided to send all auction notices in HTML - whether or not you want it, have requested it, or can read it. I got one of these lengthy piles of gibberish in my in-box with a single string of readable text: "If you can read this text, upgrade your email software." How about instead I just stop using the service?

Action (http://www.action.com) offers good and fast service, but if you make a mistake in your order - even if it's because product information is unclear or unavailable - tough noogies, they won't take it back. And the number of companies that think you want to sit through a Flash introduction (http://www.pleatsplease.com, for the brave).

Also clearly not quite getting the hang of this email thing is Tesco, which is wholly unable (apparently) to respond to customer email. Recently, they too started sending me junk email, even though they've been told many times in the past not to. Under the removal link you're supposed to click on, they helpfully note, "This may take up to five working days to unsubscribe." You can get physical groceries from them, delivered in a van, by a human, with a paper inventory, faster than that.

I rarely have anything bad to say about Amazon.com, but currently they're driving me insane by going in for pop-up windows. They couldn't just tell me about their free shipping for the holidays on the front page?

Then there are the US-centric sites that will not take a foreign credit card billing address even though: 1) the credit card is issued by an American bank and 2) the goods are being shipped within the US. These include every online drugstore in the US (yes, we understand about varying regulations to do with prescription drugs, but is there some reason you can't order hand cream or fancy Band-Aids?), several of the cheaper online mall catalogue aggregation sites, and odd smaller sites here and there that sell the kind of arts and crafts that are actually worth buying as gifts (http://www.craftsonline.com/whitopflowdr.html).

I know the US can be rather self-absorbed, but you have to wonder what these folks thought they were doing when they got online. How about that global medium?

The worst example of this kind of behavior is AT&T Wireless, which sells pre-pay phones that you are supposed to be able to recharge over the Internet, over the phone, or in person at a retail store. I spent a week in California with a zero-balance lump of dead plastic because 1) the Internet sales function is currently disabled; 2) the phone people kept promising to put the transaction through and call me back and never did; 3) the retail stores in the Bay Area "haven't yet been integrated into the network". It turned out the phone people no longer accept foreign billing addresses. But no one bothered to tell the staff. It's wireless service as designed by Mr. Prosser.

So as we go into this happy, if subdued, holiday season, this is the state of ecommerce: desperate, unresponsive, inaccessible, and badly trained. But hey, my God does it beat shopping. µ

Previous Columns
Net is the mother of re-invention. Save the Cookie
n et.wars: Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.