Tag: idiots

Finishline.com is the worst

Mismatched Shoes shipped by Finishline.com
Thanks, FinishLine.com!
If you do a search for “Nike Pegasus” you’re likely to find the best prices at Finishline.com. I was excited to locate a pair in my size discounted to $60 which is about half original retail price. The package arrived quickly and I opened it to find one shoe in my size and the other several sizes smaller.

I called their customer service line and after an extensive phone tree experience I got a message that an agent would be with me in two minutes. It actually was five minutes, so this is just a message they play rather than any predictive software at work. The non-US based agent, when she finally came on the line, had great difficulty finding my order and I had to repeat the order number multiple times. She asked me what the problem was and I said I needed shoes I could wear in my size. Her response was to give me detailed instructions for returning the shoes. I asked if I could request a replacement pair in the right size and she said no. I would have to go into the store for that and they would help me order a new pair.

I remembered from a previous ordering experience that Finish Line doesn’t have a warehouse, just a network of stores, so my order will be broadcast and another store will hopefully be able to fill it and hopefully the shoes will be the right size.

What’s happening here is that FinishLine.com is creating the appearance of being an internet retailer when they actually haven’t invested in the training, systems and logistics to pull it off. Shame on them.

P.S. I went to the store in my nearest mall to return the shoes and discovered the store had closed for good. Nearest still open is 30 miles away. I can go there or return them without getting a replacement. I also thought of ordering a new pair online but the same style is now $20 more.

Marketing to idiots

I had a client who was concerned that the information she was collecting on a registration page was going to be a potential problem because people are registering to win a prize and if they do win a prize then a/they might not want to receive it at work (which is the address we’re asking for, this being a B2B mailing) or b/they might have given a fictitious address as some people do because they don’t want to get advertising contacts yet they have to put something in the fields.

This same client had a problem at a previous company, which was the cause for her concern. She was giving away iPod shuffles (then selling for $59) to qualified prospects in return for their time to sit through a demo and apparently many people did not get their shuffles. I say “apparently” because it could also have happened that someone lied in order to get an additional shuffle…. dishonest, but hard to prove. Anyway, once bitten she wants to be sure this time.

My response (before caving, of course) was that there are always going to be a few idiots and outliers in your audience who are not going to play by the rules no matter what you tell them. And you should not do anything that is going to make your offer more complex to the vast majority, such as adding additional information on the reg page to deal with this issue by requesting an alternate shipping address in case they win. (Everybody who has ever designed an online survey or reg form knows that each additional field or question causes a certain number of people to drop out.) Suppose they fill in the form with their preferred address but, being idiots, they write it down wrong. What do you do then?

Along the same lines, I had a client back in my “suit” days who wanted to know if it was a good idea to pay a 1.5% commission based on the value of all sales paid by check in return for this supplier’s guarantee to make good any bad checks. This one was easy to figure out. Do bad checks cost more than 1.5% of revenue from all checks? No. Then this apparent insurance service is a money-losing sinkhole.  Plus, cheats are cheats. If a customer has it in their heart to trick you out of money, they’ll just find another way to do it.

Today’s moral is, the customer is not always right, not when they are idiots and outliers. Don’t screw up the rest of your promotion by making accommodations for a few wingnuts.