(no subject)
After being annoyed by Sainsbury's online shopping site once too often, I sent them this message via their online contact form:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to complain about a frustrating mis-feature of your website, which degrades my online shopping experience to the point where I often choose to shop at my local corner shop instead, despite the increased cost.
I am referring to the fact that if I forget to "save" my shopping trolley, the items I've selected disappear from it without any warning or indication that this has happened. I often spend up to half an hour making sure I've remembered everything, only to get distracted by something else and leave the computer. If I forget to "save" then that previous half-hour of work is erased. There is no reminder, nor any possibility to undo. Worse, there is no warning or indication that this has happened, so I often don't notice until the point when the lorry turns up and I realise that I've only ordered a fraction of what I thought I had.
There cannot be a technical reason for requiring me to "save" my trolley, since your server is obviously involved in all the selections I make - so it must be a deliberate feature that someone at some point decided to implement. However, I cannot see a single case in which such a feature would be useful. Why would I ever want my last half-hour's worth of shopping to be erased? And even if I did, why would I want it to be the default option, happening automatically unless I specifically say otherwise? It just doesn't make sense.
Other web sites do not work in this way, for good reason. If I add a book to my shopping cart on Amazon, for instance, it stays there, regardless of whether I log out, leave the computer, close the window, etc. I don't have to do anything specific to "save" my Amazon shopping cart, because Amazon know that if I've added something to my cart it means I want to buy it, and if I don't then I'll remove it from the cart myself. This makes it very hard to remember that I do need to go through an additional step to make things stay in my Sainsbury's shopping trolley.
It's also a horrendously mixed metaphor, which is another reason it's so hard to remember to do. Shopping trolleys in real life are not the sort of thing that need to be "saved." When I put something in a trolley I expect it to stay there until I'm ready to go to the checkout.
Today I've started writing down everything I add to my trolley, so that I can add it back if I forget to save. But I don't think I should have to do this. It partially defeats the point of doing my shopping on a computer.
I cannot be the only person who is regularly confused and frustrated by this. For all the reasons I've mentioned I implore you to change this feature, so that things added to a shopping trolley stay in the shopping trolley, even if the customer goes away mid-shop without saving.
Yours sincerely,
Nathaniel Virgo
P. S. I am glad that I copied-and-pasted this message into an external text editor, because when I finished it and clicked "send" I was told that my account had timed out and I needed to log in again. Perhaps the message was sent anyway, although there was no indication to me that it was. If so you will receive it twice; if not then it would have been lost if I hadn't "saved" it, along with all the shopping I did before writing it.
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to complain about a frustrating mis-feature of your website, which degrades my online shopping experience to the point where I often choose to shop at my local corner shop instead, despite the increased cost.
I am referring to the fact that if I forget to "save" my shopping trolley, the items I've selected disappear from it without any warning or indication that this has happened. I often spend up to half an hour making sure I've remembered everything, only to get distracted by something else and leave the computer. If I forget to "save" then that previous half-hour of work is erased. There is no reminder, nor any possibility to undo. Worse, there is no warning or indication that this has happened, so I often don't notice until the point when the lorry turns up and I realise that I've only ordered a fraction of what I thought I had.
There cannot be a technical reason for requiring me to "save" my trolley, since your server is obviously involved in all the selections I make - so it must be a deliberate feature that someone at some point decided to implement. However, I cannot see a single case in which such a feature would be useful. Why would I ever want my last half-hour's worth of shopping to be erased? And even if I did, why would I want it to be the default option, happening automatically unless I specifically say otherwise? It just doesn't make sense.
Other web sites do not work in this way, for good reason. If I add a book to my shopping cart on Amazon, for instance, it stays there, regardless of whether I log out, leave the computer, close the window, etc. I don't have to do anything specific to "save" my Amazon shopping cart, because Amazon know that if I've added something to my cart it means I want to buy it, and if I don't then I'll remove it from the cart myself. This makes it very hard to remember that I do need to go through an additional step to make things stay in my Sainsbury's shopping trolley.
It's also a horrendously mixed metaphor, which is another reason it's so hard to remember to do. Shopping trolleys in real life are not the sort of thing that need to be "saved." When I put something in a trolley I expect it to stay there until I'm ready to go to the checkout.
Today I've started writing down everything I add to my trolley, so that I can add it back if I forget to save. But I don't think I should have to do this. It partially defeats the point of doing my shopping on a computer.
I cannot be the only person who is regularly confused and frustrated by this. For all the reasons I've mentioned I implore you to change this feature, so that things added to a shopping trolley stay in the shopping trolley, even if the customer goes away mid-shop without saving.
Yours sincerely,
Nathaniel Virgo
P. S. I am glad that I copied-and-pasted this message into an external text editor, because when I finished it and clicked "send" I was told that my account had timed out and I needed to log in again. Perhaps the message was sent anyway, although there was no indication to me that it was. If so you will receive it twice; if not then it would have been lost if I hadn't "saved" it, along with all the shopping I did before writing it.