Bad customer service experience with Kobo

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by adamselene

I'm not stating an opinion on the OP here. But I will say that this “double click” theory is crap. If the Kobo web site is so poorly implemented that clicking on a button twice actually causes two purchases, they should take it offline until it's fixed. And maybe beat the help more. There's no excuse.

Thank you so much for your polite, civil evaluation of my educated guess on the behavior of a script. And I'm wrong because ...?

And if every site where two clicks = two sales were to be taken offline and changed, roughly two-thirds of the commercial Web would vanish. A lot of websites work like that, mostly because they use canned scripts that work like that. The assumption is made that a) the customer won't click "buy" twice, and if they do, b) refunding/canceling a spurious purchase will solve the problem.

[elcreative]

Damn, adamselene's got me agreeing with Worldwalker again... such a polite response... and so knowledgeable... obviously must be Mike after the war...

And I'd be surprised if it was as low as two thirds with the same problem... considering how many sites have warnings about not clicking again and/or waiting for further action...

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Thank you so much for your polite, civil evaluation of my educated guess on the behavior of a script. And I'm wrong because ...?

And if every site where two clicks = two sales were to be taken offline and changed, roughly two-thirds of the commercial Web would vanish. A lot of websites work like that, mostly because they use canned scripts that work like that. The assumption is made that a) the customer won't click "buy" twice, and if they do, b) refunding/canceling a spurious purchase will solve the problem.

[basschick]

the issue may very well not have occured on kobo's website. i work online and deal with a lot of online payment situations. a transaction may not go through - or may APPEAR to not go through - due to an issue with the user's internet connection or the bank's connection. if there's a third party biller, it could be an issue on their end, too. for that matter, it could be an issue with the programming or the cart software.

i only read through page 3, so someone else might have mentioned this already.

[Worldwalker]

The OP said that Kobo told her there were two successful transactions within moments of each other. Without a look at their logs, my best guess is that the first transaction really did fail, and when she tried again, she clicked the "buy" button twice, either accidentally or because the response was slow and she didn't think she'd done it the first time.

Some sites deal with this by disabling or removing the "buy" button when it's clicked, but that has its own pitfalls in an asynchronous medium. Also, it's dependent on the user having a scripting language (usually JavaScript) enabled, and there is a non-zero percentage of users who don't. There are ways to deal with that, of course, and ways to deal with all the issues that come up ... but most canned shopping cart software doesn't. Either the entire industry is lazy, or the consensus is that introducing additional avenues of failure and potential bugs isn't a good tradeoff to avoid the occasional double click, which can be fixed by just canceling/refunding the spurious order.

[adamselene]

Good shopping cart software deals with the “double-purchase problem” by correctly tracking the session and properly using transactions in the backend database. You would never see such a problem on most big-name ecommerce sites.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by adamselene

Good shopping cart software deals with the “double-purchase problem” by correctly tracking the session and properly using transactions in the backend database. You would never see such a problem on most big-name ecommerce sites.

As a professional in that area, I have only two words: I wish.

They're getting better, but "good shopping cart software" and "ecommerce sites" seem to be almost mutually exclusive. There are a lot of ways to deal with the problem, but to date, the usual solution seems to be "tell customers not to do it, then fix it if it happens anyway". Yeah, it's like hanging up a sign in your store saying "our cashier can't count, please use exact change" but there are a lot of companies out there with the shopping cart equivalent of such a sign.

I deal mostly with small businesses, and as bad as the big ones are, the little guys range from bad to worse to mind-blowingly terrifying. It's downright disturbing how many of them are using some sort of "shopping cart" (optimistically so-called) that they -- or rather their nephew's buddy -- got out of the back of some book or off some "FREE! FREE! BONUS DISC!" ten years ago, and doing well to have transactions work at all.

Best practices aren't. There's the way we wish they were (come on, folks, just disabling that button after one click is one line of JS and that'll stop 90% of the users from clicking it twice!) and the way they really are. As much as we wish they were all the way they ought to be, we have to deal with the cold, hard reality of a world where scripts are coded by rent-an-IT-guys who aren't all there and nephews' buddies who aren't old enough to drive, and work accordingly.

And then there's the code that makes it to Daily WTF. It is to weep.

(and the clients on Clientcopia, the websites on Web Pages That Suck, and the people who seem to stay up nights trying to think up new ways to make a grown coder cry)

[adamselene]

And thus we go back to my original point. Kobo has no excuse to be using incompetent “rent-an-IT guys” to build their shopping cart system. Your argument might be applicable to Mom's Craft Store And Bait Shop—and I'd be inclined to give them more slack—but it just doesn't apply here.

[elcreative]

Guess Amazon aren't so big after all... because their site will double bill for double-click... someone made me jump just as clicking to confirm and the double-clicks got two purchases... no problem cancelling one but it happened...

Originally Posted by adamselene

Good shopping cart software deals with the “double-purchase problem” by correctly tracking the session and properly using transactions in the backend database. You would never see such a problem on most big-name ecommerce sites.

[Worldwalker]

Except that just bloody near every online retailer uses rent-an-IT-guys or scripts from dubious places. I don't know why. They don't cut corners on anything the upper management thinks is important, but God help us, when it comes to actually paying for someone to do their IT work ... "oh, we can outsource that" and they do, to the lowest bidder -- or to someone's nephew. Of course they shouldn't. But that doesn't seem to slow them down. (I once had a very nice gig consulting for a place where "Joe knew this guy..." fixing the messes that "this guy" left, until they got bought out by someone more willing than Joe to get a server that wasn't older than some of the interns) It never ceases to amaze me ... they'll buy solid gold faucets for the executive washroom, but actually paying someone to build their website? To write their scripts? To make it all work? That's needless frivolity.

So, while I agree that Kobo should have a script that doesn't allow the user to buy something twice, slacking in that area seems to be the industry standard. It's one of those cases where a company would rather fix a problem than not have it in the first place.

And, in this case, they did fix the problem. They canceled the spurious sale. They even gave the customer a free book by way of apology. Most people (and their mothers) would be happy with that. It's when someone comes here trying to gather up a mob to march on Kobo HQ with pitchforks and torches, or at least to send strongly-worded emails, to demand a free $50 in addition that I get peeved.

Also, you pushed my "rant about idiot website owners" button, and it may take me a while to run down.

edit: "Joe" is not the real name of the guy in question, just in case it wasn't obvious.

[Fbone]

Maybe with the $50 million investment Kobo just received they can hire an IT person.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Maybe with the $50 million investment Kobo just received they can hire an IT person.

They'll probably just set diamonds in the handles of the gold faucets.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

They'll probably just set diamonds in the handles of the gold faucets.

The executives do need their perks to keep them from leaving the company.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Fbone

The executives do need their perks to keep them from leaving the company.

Yeah, remember Circuit City's Schoenover handing out the million-dollar bonuses to keep the team together while he was sacking employees who made "too much" because apparently the team that actually sells stuff isn't important?

True, upper management was leaving Circuit City like rats abandoning a sinking ship ... but they had good reason. Schoenover, of course, didn't lose a thing -- they never do -- but the people who earned that money for him were out on the street.