Why I hate on-line shopping a - rant

• Last night, after a conversation with Babybel’s daddy  – correction, after a phone conversation with Babybel and her daddy – I decide to go on line and order a toddler bed, and all the extras. Daddy suggests IKEA on line. Now, we must be the only people in the country never to have bought anything from IKEA. I did once go to their website to try to find kitchen flooring. Their search engine showed me lots of things that weren’t flooring and some flooring that specifically wasn't for kitchens. [We went to B&Q instead.] Which is why I start by looking at Boots on line – but their mattresses are more expensive. So IKEA it is – until I spot that they don’t deliver mattresses. Unfortunately we are not up to driving into Southampton, staggering round an aircraft hangar and loading a mattress into the car – that’s why we want it delivered … so

 

• back to Boots – bed ordered. Mattress ordered. Sheets ordered. Mattress protector ordered. Go to pay. Site crashes. Start again – fortunately they haven’t lost the order. Eventually order goes through – and I spot that they are giving me £20 in Advantage points – which makes them cheaper than IKEA. Good result but lots of frustration.

 

• Need a duvet – go to La Redoute. ‘The home of stress-free shopping.’ Yeh, right. Order child's duvet. Can’t find any child-duvet-sized duvet covers in the catalogue but their search engine comes up with some [a miracle for LR’s search engine]. Order duvet and 2 covers. Go to pay. Get a somewhat idiosyncratically capitalised message to say the site is experiencing problems, please try later. Try again. Order has disappeared. Find everything again. Go to pay. Get that message again. Give up.

 

• This afternoon, decide to have another go. Site is slow but in the end I'm successful. Breath sigh of relief – with any luck Babybel will have both a bed and bedding.

 

• Flushed with success I decide to order Cheese Major’s Christmas-and-birthday present [he did insist on being born on Dec. 21st] from John Lewis. Can’t be any problems there, surely? All goes smoothly – and the thing I want is reduced because a competitor is running a special offer – got to love JL! Then I come to pay. JL use one of these ‘verified by Visa’ type things – except it’s not Visa. And it rejects the card because the name on it is incorrect. No it isn’t! While I'm shouting at the computer, what appears to be a conformation of the order pops up in part of the window – obscured by up and down scrolly things and left to right scrolly things. [Don’t JL know that those things are a bugger if you use a screen reader? Not that I do but I had a student who did.] So I'm left wondering if the order has gone through or not. Fortunately an acknowledgement from JL pops into my inbox while I'm still cursing, so I do appear to have successfully ordered a bread maker.

 

• Despite all this I decide to put into an order to Lakeland. And it goes through without a hitch. Well done, Lakeland.

 

Here’s something else that’s a bit of a disaster.

It used to look like this

 

 

 

 

but unfortunately I mucked about with it so it now looks like this 

 

 

 

although some bits aren’t too bad.