2006-01-31

Ordered some goodies from the GoogleStore website about 3 weeks ago. Unfortunately, one of the items I wanted wasn't in stock, but GatewayCDI couldn't tell me how much it would cost to ship the order for the in-stock items until everything came into stock 3 weeks later. When they finally told me that the shipping would cost almost half as much as the goods, I cancelled the order.

This is the sort of idiocy that happens when a company outsources its services. GoogleStore had some cool goodies on their site, but due to their dire customer service and excessive shipping costs, they've lost a sale.

Having worked in e-commerce, I can say that it is not impossible to calculate the shipping costs on-the-fly - there is no reason why they couldn't have told me the shipping costs as I placed them in my shopping cart.

GoogleStore: dump GatewayCDI and either do the e-commerce in-house, or find a better outsourced e-commerce solution with cheaper shipping.

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