Understanding Nothing

Almost anyone who lives outside the US but who has had to deal with US-based websites will have stories of hate about registration forms that complain that your state/zipcode/phone number is invalid, solely because it falls squarely outside the sphere of understanding of the parochial programmer who created the form.

When I still lived in Northern Ireland, I occasionally encountered sites that went one better than this, by giving me no valid option for the ‘country’ field. The list they provided had a fatal flaw: it offered ‘Great Britain’ but not ‘United Kingdom’. As a rule the Customer Service responses to my emails about this problem were less than satisfactory, with most not really having a clue what I was talking about. Occasionally, after pointing out the large clue right there in the name (the part of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” that isn’t “Great Britain”), some sites would actually change their registration form. Most, however, never did.

It’s well accepted these days that websites should be kept “fresh”, particularly if you’re trying to sell things. You can’t just throw together a site, forget about it, and watch the money roll in. But I decided to do a little experiment to see how many sites keep their registration form up-to-date.

One year ago today the Republic of Montenegro declared its independence from the confederated union of Serbia and Montenegro. Iceland was the first country to recognise Montenegro as an independent nation, quickly followed by Switzerland and Estonia. Within a week it had been recognised by the EU, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council, and, crucially, by Serbia. Before the end of the month Montenegro had been accepted into the United Nations. Not everything moves quite so quickly: it took until January this year for it to be accepted as a full member of the World Bank Group and the IMF, and it wasn’t until last month that it became a member of the Council of Europe.

On the web, however, where things are meant to move more quickly, the Republic of Montenegro still barely exists at all. I surveyed the registration forms of 50 websites that I use or have used to see if they offer Montenegro as an option in their ‘address’ form. The results were horrifying.

After working my way through a variety of DVD and/or CD retailers to no avail, I moved on to the literary world. After ABE and Bookmooch let me down, I thought that Amazon would be different. Unfortunately, not. In fact none of the standard “consumer goods” sites at all, in any field, seemed to believe in Montenegrin independence. Astoundingly eBay not only don’t recognise Montenegro, they never even got around to recognising Serbia and Montenegro, still only offering “Yugoslavia” as an option.

After a little thought, I realised that the airlines must surely be up to date, but neither Easyjet, nor even British Airways (home of the infamous 200 options for the Title field) provided any relief.

Estonian Air, rather interestingly, in a trait shared with Google, offers options for “Serbia”, “Montenegro” and “Serbia and Montenegro”. It’s unclear whether in each case this is a political statement, a simple case of forgetfulness, or an inability to assign users that were previously registered to one or the other, and thus needing to keep the combined entity as well.

In several hours of exploration, the only site I’ve found so far that has actually removed “Serbia and Montenegro” and added “Montenegro” as a separate entry is Dell. One year on, and only one (and I’ll give Google and Estonian Air a half point each) of the 50 sites I checked have caught up with the state of the world today.

The world is a fluid place. In the last 75 years the number of independent nations in the world has risen from under 70 to almost 200. There a number of places that are de facto independent, but aren’t widely recognised yet. None of the sites I checked offer ‘Transnistria’ or ‘South Ossettia’ as options yet, for example. This is hardly surprising, but I’m stunned that one year after independence, almost nowhere online has bothered to update their registration form to recognise Montenegro. Shame on all of you.

I’m a big suporter of websites doing proper validation. I even released a perl module to help people do it more easily (on the, perhaps naive, assumption that the easier it is the more likely it is people will do it).

But I’m an even bigger detractor of websites doing stupid validation. Yesterday I finally caved in and ordered a subscription to the New Yorker. I’m currently paying cover price every week for this (£182 a year), and there’s a little card in each issue offering me a subscription for 149 euro (£99 at today’s exchange rate). Of course I did a quick search online to see if anyone else is doing a better offer, but none of the UK magazine subscription sites even seem to offer it. (Of course the magazine subscription market in the UK is very different from the US, and even the magazines which you can subscribe to you barely get a discount at all. In the US from what I can see you tend to only pay about 25% of the newsstand price, or less). The New Yorker’s publisher’s Condé Naste, however, do offer an international subscription at $112 (at the current ludicrous exchange rate that’s under £60). It’s surface mail, so I’ll probably have to wait a few weeks longer for each issue, but that’s OK – the “timely” information in the New Yorker isn’t that useful to me anyway.

So I tried to use their online ordering form. Of course they fall into all the old traps. The credit card field doesn’t allow entries with spaces (there is NO excuse for this whatsoever), they expect a State (although at least “International” is an option), they want my postcode with no space – even though the space is an integral part of UK postcodes, and I couldn’t find my country (they have neither United Kingdom, nor Great Britain[1] listed – after thinking maybe they’d moved these out to the top of the list they way some sites do and failing there also, I eventually discovered they have Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man etc as separate entries!)

But even after handling all this the form kept giving me an annoying JavaScript pop-up telling me “Please enter a valid address”. Of course it didn’t bother telling me what exactly about my address it believed to be invalid. I really couldn’t find anything wrong my address, so I resorted to the geek last resort: I viewed the source of the page, located the link to the JavaScript validation code, loaded it up and attempted to discover what its validation rules were.

Bizarrely, the JavaScript was rejecting my address as the first line didn’t contain a space! I live in an old house with a name, and so the first line of my address is merely “Lismachan”. But that’s not good enough for Condé Naste! They need my first line to be “Lismachan “. What people who don’t read JavaScript are supposed to do I just don’t know.

Why do people persist in putting stupid barriers in the way of people who want to give them money?

[1] I have another rant for people who force me to have Great Britain, even though Northern Ireland is obviously the part of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” that isn’t in Great Britain…

Back in the early 90s I got a bundled copy of Microsoft Money with a PC. At the time I had next to no money, and was pretty much living off credit cards. Keeping track of who I had to pay when was critically important, and so I tried Money, found it invaluable, and have pretty much stuck with it ever since. I’m fairly anal about entering everything (a source of great amusement to some), but I’m a sucker for data and reports and graphs and the like,

I’ve looked at a few of the upgrades to Money over the years, but I’ve never actually installed them. The demo versions never seemed to play nicely with a pre-existing installation, and it seemed that if I decided not to upgrade after the 30 days were up I wouldn’t be able to use my existing version either easily (I’d need to have backed up my data in advance as newer versions would undoubtedly ‘upgrade’ the file format, and I’d need to re-install the earlier version from CD, probably after cleaning out some registry entries).

So recently when I got a new PC for home I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try the latest demo. I could leave my ‘real’ version on my work PC, copy across the latest backup of my data, and play with both in parallel on two machines. At first I hated it. The interface has changed significantly in 10 years and there didn’t really seem to be that many new features that would persuade me to upgrade. I never really liked their “online banking” side of things which supposedly interfaces with my banks and credit card companies, and most of the new features seemed related to that, as well as online bill paying, house inventory tracking, house buying etc. The core functionality of just keeping track of basic transactions seemed mostly the same as ever, only with a clumsier interface.

But after a week or so playing I began to notice tiny little changes that made things much easier. Previously, when adding transactions in January, if you entered something from the previous month as 24/12 it would automatically fill in the current year, which of course was ludicrous. Now it correctly auto-fills the previous year. There’s a nice function to “flag” transactions to be brought to your attention again at a specified later date. There are a variety of new ways in which you can order the transactions when reconciling an account. Even the online import of a statement from my bank is much smoother, correctly merging transactions that I’d already entered even if they were on a slightly different date and entered to a slightly different payee.

So, when my 30-day trial was over I decided to go ahead and purchase it. I went back to Microsoft Money home page where I downloaded it from, and searched for the part that would let me enter my credit card number to get a product key to “unlock” my trial version.

Of course I searched in vain. Microsoft apparently don’t work like that. Instead I had to go to Amazon, order a physical CD in a box to be shipped to me, wait a week for it arrive, uninstall my trial version, and re-install what appears to be an identical piece of software from a CD. It’s not as if you even get a manual or anything – it’s just a CD in a box.

I really don’t get this. This is a solved problem. You download a trial version. It expires. You go to a website, give your credit card number, get a key that unlocks the software. You plug that key in, and bingo, your software works again. There’s no need to send me a CD through the post. There’s no need to force me to uninstall and reinstall the software. There’s no need for me to wait a week between deciding to purchase and actually being able to use your software.

So maybe Microsoft don’t want to upset their dealer network. (Like Microsoft have ever cared how they upset…) Then allow the on-line retailers to sell your license keys for you. Amazon could just have easily sent me an email with a registration number when I bought the product as send me a box (actually they could do this much more easily, and much more profitably). Sell boxes to people who really want them. But those of us who just want working software, please don’t get in our way.

PHX News have a bizarre story about how Christians are moving their business away from Amazon to Christian-only online stores. This, of course, is hardly surprising.

The explanation, however, is:

Amazon.com on the other hand sells grace and smut mixed together. This of course is objectionable to a great many Christians. To illustrate her point, Zahn referred to a book offered through amazon.com that depict humans having sex with demons, using a well known Bible quote as it’s [sic] title He Came To set The Captives Free by Rebecca Brown.

In my earlier days on the net I was one of the creators of The Jack Chick WWW Archive!, devoted to the works of one of the 20th Century’s greatest conspiracy theorists, and publisher of all those little religious comics, Jack T Chick (his basic thesis: Everything is a Jesuit plot).

The bizarre twist in all of this, of course, is that “He Came To Set The Captives Free” was actually originally published by Chick, and is usually found for sale in Christian Bookstores – it’s from the same series of books as Catholic Terror in Ireland, What’s Wrong With Christian Rock, and my personal favourite: Lucifer Dethroned (“Bill Schnoebelen was a Vampire until Jesus set him free!”)

Sometimes this stuff just defies parody.

The UK on-line DVD retail market is getting interesting again. Even ignoring imports, the Region 2 market was for a year or two pretty much a 2 horse race between Play.com and CDwow.

Play.com are based in Jersey and can take advantage of the no-VAT loophole. Recently, however, they’ve been gradually raising their prices, foolishly believing that customers won’t notice.

CDwow are in Hong Kong and ship from various locations around Europe (recently Sweden). [They're also under investigation from the BPI for their music imports]. They’re usually cheaper than Play but carry a narrower range.

For a long time Amazon was completely out of it – relying on their name more than their price. But with the introduction of their super saver shipping to the UK they suddenly became competitive – as long as your order was over the £25 threshold. Coupled with their 20% discounts on new releases – particularly box sets – this often made them the cheapest.

Now BlackStar have decided to become competitive again. They’ve finally brought back free postage to the UK and Ireland, and have started shipping low value items from Jersey.

So now it’s worth shopping around again. To take an example, the new Season 1 and Season 2 combined DVD box-set of 24 is now £54.99 at Play.com, £53.99 at BlackStar, £52.99 at CDwow, and £49.99 at Amazon.

Chicago is £13.99 at all of them, except Play.com where it’s £14.99 (but will incur postage at Amazon unless it’s part of a bigger order).

Teachers Season 1 is £17.99 at Play, £15.99 at Amazon and BlackStar and unavailable at CDwow.

And in back catalogue, The Pillow Book is £9.99 at Amazon, £8.99 at BlackStar and £7.99 at Play.

And there’s a few new kids on the block with cheap prices as well: PriceStorm are based out of Guernsey rather than Jersey, and DVDplus has been resurrected as part of the new THE. And ChoicesDirect are always worth checking out; they still have the 20% automatic pre-order discount, and are often the cheapest if you’re looking for something on VHS.

And that’s not counting everyone’s special offers…

Interesting times, indeed.

At the Emerging Technology Conference I heard Amazon staff say several times that Amazon is (or is striving to be) the most customer centric company on Earth. Every time I hear this it irks me more and more because I know that my dealings with Amazon have generally been pretty poor.

I don’t doubt Amazon’s sincerity in this regard, but I think they’ve got their terminology slightly wrong. I think they’re actually striving to be the most “customers centric” company rather than “customer centric”. Of course this doesn’t sound as good – in fact it just sounds wrong – but I think it’s closer to the truth.

From talking to lots of other Amazon customers, and from some of my experience with them, for the most part Amazon “Just Works”. They’ve put a lot of effort in to making sure that the general customer experience is right. But if you happen to fall through the cracks somewhere, everything falls apart and they really can’t cope.

Their customer care staff are notorious for not reading your email carefully and latching on to the first phrase in it that they have a stock answer for. I’ve had cases where this happened 3 or 4 times about the same matter before finally finding someone prepared to actually take the time to understand the problem.

When their systems work (and that’s probably 99.9% of the time now), they’re great – but it’s when they don’t that the customer relationship is at the most risk – and Amazon are terrible at handling this.

When we built BlackStar we decided to take a different approach. Because we didn’t really have a lot of money or time to make our systems work quite as well, we aimed for making 90% of orders flow smoothly – and made sure that our Customer Care staff were able to deal with all the cases that fell through the cracks. Most of the effort went into dealing with individual customers one by one rather than the abstract concept of all customers.

A few interesting things happened from this:

Firstly, we got to see which areas we were spending the most time dealing with, and so had a clear indication of where to spend our development resources.

Secondly, we found that customers actually seemed to like this approach. I’ve heard it said that a customer whose complaint is handled well ends up being more loyal than a customer with no complaints – and this definitely seemed to be the case. Our customers seemed impressed with the level of individual attention they received, and that paid off for us.

Thirdly, we found that this was even more true for our “power users”. The customers who tended to buy the most from us, tended to have the most problems, but by dealing well with them, we actually got to know them. It turned out that most of them had previously shopped with competitors, and when they’d managed to fall through the cracks there they’d received terrible service and promptly started shopping elsewhere. These customers were even more impressed with how we handled such cases as they were able to compare it with what they’d experienced elsewhere, and many of them remained customers for a very long time.

It’s seems that there’s two approaches you can take to dealing with problem cases. You can either put your efforts into ensuring they never happen (as Amazon seem to do), or accept that they will happen and put your efforts into being able to handle them well when they do (as we did at BlackStar). In reality you need to work at both, but I maintain that the payoffs are much greater from the second approach.

Whether you can ever attain that if you don’t treat Customer Care as a core competency, and outsource it, as Amazon do, is an interesting question …

Dave Cross:

Note to Play.com’s IT department – delivery address is an attribute of an order, not an account. It’s ok to have a default delivery address as an attribute of the account, but a customer must be able to override that on any particualr order.

Of course BlackStar.co.uk handles all of this stuff. Just a pity that it’s so ludicrously expensive for almost everything now…

Scott writes about how Amazon are being really nice by reminding him that he has an unused gift voucher.

In many ways this is indeed a nice touch, when most organisations probably would indeed just want to sit on the money as long as possible.

However, I have a theory that it’s not quite so straightforward. Technically any unused gift vouchers are classed as a liability on a company’s balance sheet. If they were solely booked as revenue then there could theoretically be a situation where a company has booked billions of dollars of revenue, look really healthy, and then, all of a sudden, people come along and demand the billion dollars worth of goods they’re owed. (Yes, it’s probably quite unlikely to happen like that, but these rules are made by accountants, and they’re even more pedantic than us computer programmers…)

Amazon are still in the stage where they’re trying to show that they have a real viable long term business. Their accounts come under intense scrutiny every quarter. Even if all the gift vouchers have contributed to the revenue line already, I suspect that Amazon don’t like having more in the creditors line than they can help.

Or maybe I’m just cynical, and they really are just doing a nice thing…

I discovered yesterday that Barton Fink and The Draughtsman’s Contract are both available on DVD in France. Thankfully they both have English language tracks, so they’re now on their way to me. A combination of O-Level French, Google Translate, and the fact that all Amazon sites work pretty much the same way made it relatively simple to place the order.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which only seems to be available in Australia, arrived for me recently.

I found all of these pretty much by chance.

What I’d really like to see is a global comparison site for DVDs, telling me where things are available, and where appropriate comparing the differences in different regional versions, and telling me where I can buy whichever version looks best.

DVDcompare is pretty good, telling me for example that the Portuguese version of Lost Highway has a Dolby Digital 5.1 track and additional extra features. But it doesn’t tell me where I can buy it(I still can’t find an online Portuguese DVD site!), and it doesn’t know about any of the 3 DVDs I mentioned above.

I found a site once that did worldwide DVD price comparisons. But I can’t find it again.

Does anyone know of any useful sites for this sort of thing?

New Architect shows (with examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly), why contingency design is important, and what you should do – including some nice tips I haven’t come across before (like ww.amazon.com [sic]).

This is another one of those areas where people seem to be paralyzed by their inability to create a 100% solution, and so never even get a 20% solution never mind an 80% one. You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a state of the art search engine. A simple solution is to just log all the searches that fail, work out what they should have matched (usually it’s a simple mis-spelling – particularly if your search engine is picky about punctuation), and then add something that automatically maps all future searches for that term to the ‘correct’ version. 20 minutes a day working your way down the most popular mis-searches will catch 80% of your problem cases in 6 months …

[via Tomalak]