What happens when Best Buy’s in-store pickup fails?
Last week I decided to get a new monitor. I could have ordered it from my favorite computer store online, but I’m impatient when it comes to gadgets and I wanted my monitor right away so the anticipation wouldn’t ruin my sleep. I found a monitor in-stock from Best Buy and ordered it for in-store pickup.
A couple of hours later, Best Buy emailed me. Shorter Best Buy: “Sorry, the monitor you ordered isn’t really in stock. But you can call our customer service people and we’ll ship it to you! Otherwise, we’ll cancel the order in six days.”
This is a perfect example of customer service done for the convenience of the store and not for the customer. Best Buy created a number of headaches rather needlessly and tried to push me into shopping behavior I was avoiding. These are the kinds of things I try to avoid doing when designing and building websites for people.
If I am making an online order, I do not want to talk to someone on the phone. There needs to be a process for either accepting shipment or canceling an order using an online interface. Calling customer service is unacceptable. But from a corporate standpoint it’s a great idea, because when they have you on the phone they can advertise at you (while on hold) or try to upsell you. I’d love to see numbers on how many people actually follow through with phone orders after the fact; my suspicion is that it’s too much work for most people, which is why Best Buy turns into a nag.
Once I discovered I was going to have to wait anyway, I ordered my monitor from a trusted online vendor — one that let me order the item online, accepts return information online, and responds to customer service requests online. They shipped me the monitor and I had it in two days.
For a week, Best Buy continued to send me email messages urging me to call customer service and arrange for my order to be shipped to me. Pointless emails, because they’d already lost the sale. All they did for a week was remind me of their own failure.
Well, that’s not really all they did. When I made my purchase, Best Buy pre-authorized my card for the purchase price. I don’t have a problem with that, but it was on the expectation of their being an actual completed transaction at the end. When I chose another vendor, I then had charges for two, not one, monitor sale pending. One from the other store, one from Best Buy.
Pre-authorizations clear after a couple of days if you haven’t completed the transaction, and sure enough the Best Buy charge evaporated. Only to be replaced the next day with another authorization. They’re keeping the order open, you see. Even though they lost the sale, even though I had already accepted delivery of my new monitor, they were re-authorizing my card for a purchase I would never complete. That is not cool.
I can’t say I won’t buy from Best Buy in the future. They are the closest electronics store that is not Radio Shack and pretty much the only game in town. But I don’t have to shop in-town. In the future, I’ll order things for delivery from the company that does business my way, and deal with the shipping delays and charges. No more in-store pickup from Best Buy for me.
