Early Holiday Hunting

Conclusion: By not linking the e-mail offer to the site’s landing page and accompanying cart, The Sharper Image almost lost this sale. And although I gave the call center rep a source code, he still was prompted to make an incorrect cross-sell offer.

On another day, I tried like the dickens to order a book from Amazon.com as a gift for one of my colleagues. I’ve successfully ordered products from Amazon before, but this time it was a fiasco. The company had an old credit card number of mine, and no amount of work—answering its prompts, keying in new credit card data, trying another card—proved successful. I got repeated error messages, almost as if the site was in some weird cyber loop. I called the customer service number to order the book, but after about 10 minutes on hold, I hung up.