Two's a Queue

Retail, eCommerce, usability, customer experience, service, technology...

Thursday 19 January 2012

Spotted #2


Random series on pet ecom hates. Episode 2.

Oh ASOS - how sometimes I get jealous of your amazingness and then other times I think - just why.

Just why would your system KNOW I qualify for a promotion but make me add it manually. The technical effort involved in letting me know about the code surely outweighs just getting it to add automatically?




And why can I only have one promo at a time? Just because I used a 20% off means I now can't have free delivery even though the total of my order is still over the threshold of £100?

ASOS often I love you. Often you just let me down.

2 comments:

G said...

Hmm, although it looks simple in your case, that would be very hard to generalise it for all the scenarios. Ok sure, when you have only one promotion applicable to a basket, you can just automatically apply it and you're done. It can't do any harm.

But if the customer keeps adding products, they will probably qualify for more than one promotion. Sometime, it is obvious which one is the best one, but sometimes it isn't. Would you prefer a free delivery or a 10% off your total? Depends on the total amount and the type of delivery you'd like.

It would be great but very complex in the end and the simplest solution is often the best one! But I agree, another great simple solution would have been to make sure no promotion can overlap :)

H said...

Hi G - Yes I wholeheartedly agree that often you can end up trying to do too much for the customer when the simple option would just be to let them use their own judgement and have a manual step.

I do however think there are a lot of well-trodden paths in this kind of functionality though - some (if not all) of the big supermarkets have systems which will calculate the best deal for the customer based on all sorts of complex rules. I remember M&S built a great system into their POS for calculating their festive 3 for 2's without penalising the customer for buying more than one in a single checkout (so when "lined up" in value order the items at position 3 and 6 were discounted rather than just the cheapest two). I think ASOS could definitely make a great start here by introducing something which ensures you still get the benefit of your threshold promotion when applying another promotion - as long as the post discount value fulfils the threshold rule. I guess my point is that technology can do wonderful things to improve the customer experience and I often think that some online retailers sometimes miss that!

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