Eclectic Echoes

Lands' End - Painful shopping

My wife and I received a gift certificate from someone for Lands’ End. Now neither my wife or I typically shop at Lands’End normally, but we looked through the catalog included with the gift certificate package. There were some things in there that we could use the certificate for. Of course it should have been a simple matter to go online and enter the item numbers in from the catalog, checkout and be done. My wife initially wanted to use the catalog order form, but since that form and the catalog could not inform us of the final shipping and tax charges, she relented to going online. Lands’ End’s online store does have a great feature — Catalogue Quick Order — where you can enter all the catalogue item numbers in, click next then choose sizes and colors from drop down choices, and end up (ideally) with a filled shopping cart ready to check out. Unfortunately things did not work that simply.

We entered the catalogue numbers in, then on the next page choose the sizes and colors that my wife wanted. Ooops, up comes a warning screen — the color choice for the jacket is not available. The error screen does give the available choices, (2 out of the normal 7, neither choice which my wife really wants, but hey it’s “free”) but the drop down box, even on this page, still has all seven choices. After selecting one of the choices that the error screen said was still available, we were taken to the filled shopping basket. Fine… Nope. Only one item was in the basket!

So leave the jacket and go back to the home page and the catalogue number wizard and add back in the other items — socks and a shirt — “next”, choose sizes and colors…”next”  Arggghhhhh! Once again with the damn error page. This time the socks were not available in size small. Ok…click on the box to “continue with out adding this item”, get to the shopping basket, and find two items, both the same jacket! Now we didn’t want two jackets and we did want socks and a shirt, both of which were entered into the “Quick Catalogue” order form. So.. delete both jackets clearing the shopping cart entirely. Click the logo to go back to the home page, Clear the Lands’ End cookies from Firebird. Start again.

I entered — for the third time mind you — the jacket and the shirt catalogue numbers into the “Quick Catalogue” form, click next. Choose the size and color of the jacket (careful to choose one of the 2 colors that are actually available) then the size and color of the shirt. Deep breath. Click Next. SCRREEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM!

Yes, the error message again. This time the shirt is not available in my wife’s size, not in any of 11 color combinations! Now my wife is generally a very calm and easygoing type of person — balances me out very well — but at this point she was the one who said “Screw them then! They can shove their gift certificate up their web site.”

She’s calmed down now, but she’s still not very happy with the company, we tried to order 5 or six more items all unavailable. Now she refuses to order from them, at least online. Honestly I can’t really blame her at all. We will be in New York next week. If we are able to, we’ll look into visiting the store there. 

At first I was extremely happy to see the “Catalogue Quick Order” feature, perfect for us, as my wife had the item numbers already. Unfortunately the integration of their web ordering and their stock management is enough to block an order but not enough to update obviously dynamically generated pages and forms. On top of that the “Quick” wizard loses any part of the order beyond any problems it encounters. It must be adding the items from the form serially then when it finds a problem it drops everything (literally) while it attempts to get the user to resolve the problem. In our particular case there was a problem with every item we wanted, which led to three trips through the wizard – in part perhaps because I’m stubborn and wanted the damn thing to work like it was obviously intended to work — before giving up. This could be a very nice feature, unfortunately the execution makes for an exceptionally user–un-friendly experience.