I admit it. I am a demanding consumer. But, aren't we all? We want everything better, faster, easier, and more personalized than ever before. We want to feel like we're important to the companies we do business with. But why is it that despite every marketing milestone and breakthrough many web experiences often fail to meet our expectations?

Blame company structure or budget or legacy systems or leadership or the weather. But the more you excuse it, the worse it gets.

I've made a career out of studying, advocating for, and creating customer experiences and sharing them with clients, in columns, speeches, a book, and now this blog.

So, forget the excuses. Here you'll find a consumer perspective on what works, what doesn't, who's getting it right, and who's still in the dark.

Straight-forward. Unfiltered. Customer fanaticism.




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August 29, 2006

Enough of the Aggregators!

Every time I turn around there's a new shopping site rearing its ugly, uninspiring user interface. There are the old-timers like Shopping.com and MySimon, and newcomers like Mpire.com and Slide.com, both written up rather favorably a couple weeks ago the New York Times ("More Date for Online Shoppers, and Plenty of Pictures, too," 8/14/06). This week it's Pricefish.com, where "there's nothing fishy about saving money!" (Seriously, that's on their site) And don't forget Froogle, still in beta testing and recently booted off the Google's front door, but still alive and kicking.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to pay a penny more than I need to for anything, but these sites have a steeper cost in my world. This isn't just shopping at TJMaxx or clipping coupons, this is an all-or-nothing price battle. I don't want to go through life spending this much time and energy to save a few bucks, or give up my right to any kind of enjoyable brand experience. I hardly see how comparison pricing sites provide me with what Pricefish describes as "the ultimate shopping experience".

August 29, 2006 in Whoops! | Permalink | Bookmark

Comments

I couldn't agree more. Enough with the 40 different aggregators. They're all trying to get a few extra visits from each other before their VC funding runs out... they provide little or no value to the consumer. A lot of them have such out of date product and pricing... and from the retailer's standpoint there's NO standardization in terms of what data you provide them... in what format... I have to imagine that at some point Retailers are going to give up and say "enough." If you need a discount on a service or product, google the word/product/retailer, and the word "coupon" or "promo code" and you'll get any discount you need, 10x's faster. .bb

Posted by: bb | Aug 29, 2006 3:19:11 PM

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