For the last week, we have visited different techsites attempting to buy a fairly basic bit of kit. Thanks to the world wide web, we shopped all over the EU and visited nearly a dozen hardware suppliers.
All the kid was finally bought from Amazon, because the traditional hardware sites made it too difficult to buy what we we wanted or turned us away.
Firstly, despite the fact that they sold products across the EU, few of the sites even had a button which translated their page into English. This is not a killer as there are ways around this, but if you want customers from across your borders you do not tell them to go forth and multiply in your native language.
Secondly, to make a sale all of them required personal data . Some of that personal data was completely irrelevant to the sale of computer equipment to an individual. One Italian site insisted that you hand over your government tax number or it would not complete the transaction.
Thirdly, some sites were poorly designed so that if you managed to jump through all the hoops they wanted the site would insist that you had given them the wrong password to access your information.
In one case we found ourselves looking at an order form with our name, address, and personal data and credit card information on it, in otherwords all the data needed to complete the transaction, only to be rejected because of a password error.
Lastly, there is an arrogance about delivery. It is something that exists on Amazon's partners too but it is completely and utterly annoying and stupid. If you are a member of the European bloc, you should be delivering to that bloc. You have access to customers with money. You do not decide to supply parts locally. You get off your arse and negotiate with a courier company to deliver across Europe.
Overclockers.co.uk recently decided to stop selling its products to Italy. Apparently, it re-negotiated its courier contracts so that Italian customers were ignored. Why? We asked and they would not tell us.
They are not the only ones. English suppliers appear to be the worst with sites getting snarky even if you want to deliver your product to Northern Ireland. Some German sites had a similar problem. Italy is especially bad at being snubbed by hardware suppliers. Some Balkan countries are also snubbed. Each of the sites which rejected our sale based on where we were living had already demanded that we register before the sale was rejected. Thus they had access to personal data that they did not need.
The point is that if your industry is cash strapped, and a customer shows up at your (online) door, you do not send them away. You make the sale because it is still money. You do not make that sale difficult, or refuse to provide it.
Amazon might be an arse of a company, but often the goods were the same price as the outside retailers and it delivered it to where we live, rather than were the supplier wanted us to live. This is one of the reasons it is making lots of money in the EU, while local suppliers are going under.
It is also an interesting point that when we wrote to each of the companies pointing out the deficiency of their service -- none replied.
Compare that with online outfits like Lulu, or Book Depository and you will see how bad the service European IT people are getting.