I do a lot of my shopping online. I want niche stuff (like odd books, unusual plants and specialist gardening equipment) and it saves on crowds. It also saves on parking money and shoe leather (or in Pete’s case – wear and tear on his trousers). And so I come into contact with a lot of webshops, some of which are good and some of which are awful.
Two recent gripes are the shop (one of many) that has the email signup box where the Search box should be – endlessly annoying.
And this morning’s horror occurred when I tried to buy two Gripple starter packs (curb your imagingation, they’re for training fruit trees) direct from the supplier. The webshop at Gripple Direct is dire. After filling in your billing address, it makes you fill in your shipping address, with no easy way of telling it to use the same one. And then it takes you to the secure payment bit – and it asks you for both addresses again. Whilst attempting to copy and paste from one side to the other, it managed to blank the whole form – at which point I gave up and bought my Gripples from Dobies instead – a much easier experience. And I saved myself £5 on the order by using the discount code PSV9 (allegedly valid until the end of March 09).
Whether or not the Gripples are worth all the aggro remains to be seen!
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