17 Dec 2003 | Tim said...

Boring answer: My ordering went fairly well on Amazon last night....that is, after I spent 45-minutes loading up my shopping cart at buy.com only to have the system completely crap out on my as I attempted to check out.

Long story short...in order to ship all these items to my fiancee's parents' house, I had to add a ship-to address to my profile. Thing is, the system kept timing out on me...over-and-over-again. The only thing returned to me was a completely un-helpful ASP error message. VERY frustrating...so i went to Amazon.

17 Dec 2003 | Lyndon said...

Tim -- you don't understand how clever buy.com actually is. By first saving money on Windows servers, they don't have to worry about additional overhead items such as stock, shippers or people to count the money. Stupid Amazon and their Unix servers has to ship all of that stuff out, hire someone to count the money and thus increase their costs. I won't even go into the costs of bandwidth for serving up product pages and purchase confirmation pages instead of error pages. By not selling anything, buy.com actually saves more money in the long run! Do you now understand how it's a good thing for them they didn't take your money?

17 Dec 2003 | Hagbard Celine said...

Perhaps they should have spent money on effective design and programming of their site. Applications running on Unix get errors, too; if the software is well made who cares what platform it's on (other than Larry Ellison and Bill Gates)?

17 Dec 2003 | Don Schenck said...

Went to the Nordstroms site (LOVE that store). No link for "Over $100" ... or like "The Sky's The Limit". Guess I'll surf over to Neiman Marcus. :-) Or Davidoff.

(or JRCigars.com *GRIN*)

17 Dec 2003 | Don Schenck said...

P.S. Yeah, cool ... Neiman Marcus has a "Indulge Them" category. Woo-hoo!!

18 Dec 2003 | jupiter said...

You're right, Don - Neiman Marcus has got it! Besides they're easier to navigate, have a simpler design and more tasteful products (last point is just my opinion).

I think that especially in the holiday season, when customers are not only in a hurry, sprinting from one shop to another but also when they're online, it's important that a shopping site runs smooth and fast. I appreciate that much more than such gimmicks like a giftfinder. Just categorized lists like NM's work very well for me. I don't see the advantage of dropdowns that force the whole page to reload several times.