Tuesday, June 29, 2010

spreadshirt sucks

You'd think that after 10 years of e-commerce, that shopping carts would be a solved problem. I just sent this feedback to spreadshirt.com.

Your shopping cart sucks. I bought a shirt from you through reddit.com, and I'm pretty sure I told it to order 3 shirts, but you only shipped and billed me for 1. So once I received it, I followed the link from the receipt to reorder. But clicking on the order number did nothing. My javascript console tells me that load_order() is undefined. I very nearly gave up at that point. So I went to spreadshirt.com directly, and clicked around until I found my order history there, and load_order() is defined from there. So somebody screwed up the javascript includes.
But it gets better. I ordered 5 shirts this time, looked for an "update" button and didn't find one, and clicked to continue the order. Only on the last page of the order process did I notice that the quantity was still at 1.

So I clicked on my shopping cart to back up the process and fix it. That showed me the item I was trying to order, and I clicked to proceed. But you were actually showing me the last page of the process again, so clicking committed the order... for one shirt.

Now on my fourth trip through the system, you at least gave me the option to cancel the order (thank you), and I once again repeated the process. And this time I found the "refresh" arrows next to the quantity. Protip: it's not actually that hard to have javascript code check the value of the quantity field when people click the button to go to the next page. You're throwing away orders and pissing people off when you expect your customers to find and click a button to tell your page something it should already know.

Finally, heading to the contact page, I get to enter a captcha (even though I'm already logged in) and type in a little tiny textbox to send you feedback, because you don't want to have to deal with the horrors of actually publishing an email address, even though you demand mine as part of the order process.

4 comments:

brozy said...

Wow. That sounds completely irritating. I hope they act on your feedback.

Anonymous said...

As of March of 2012, SpreadShirt e-commerce is still a pile of junk. Although I have worked for quite a few large retailers, I still see this lame cart as a reason I won't order again. Shipping is slow, communication from their Customer Service is non-existent. I would NOT BUY from Spreadshirt.

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree more. Still working on getting a simple sweatshirt I ordered 3 weeks ago. They apparently had internal communication issues regarding production on it, but waited until I messaged them to let me know about the delay. When I called, a customer service rep just told me he's sorry about the delay and doesn't know why nobody got in touch with me. I will never buy from Spreadshirt again.

Unknown said...

2018 and they still suck. I've never seen such a screwed up site before.