Just Take The Money!

It’s really amazing how many web sites have broken shopping carts in one form or another. It’s the ultimate form of stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. The favorite is always shopping carts that time out. Nothing like throwing your customers out of the store after they’ve decided to purchase from you.

British Airways seem to have perfected the art of displaying an error page just when you were pulling out your credit card. Bonus points for reporting that their systems aren’t responding as if that actually means something to the user who just got a response from their systems – the error page.

Recently though I’ve come across a few more creative ways to not make money. It turns out that Google Checkout, at least as implemented for Google Site Search is just a tad bit buggy – instead of taking you to a page to fill in your details it refreshes the current page. So you select your product, click checkout and are asked to select your product again. Pure genius!

Oh and reporting it to Google won’t help – they don’t answer emails, even when you can find the contact us form.