Whatever Happened To The Customer Is Always Right?

I think one of the greatest reasons for the boom in on-line shopping is not having to deal with the people who run businesses we actually still walk in to. In many cases it’s like they are doing us a favor by being there and that’s it.

I’m sorry, if I walk in to your business to spend my money I think you have to live up to your end of the bargain, and that’s providing good service. It’s also nice if you actually act like you are glad to have a customer in your store.

Bad service example: I was in a large home improvement store looking for something. They paged for help and I waiting for help for over 20 minutes. I could have been lying on the floor bleeding and they wouldn’t have noticed, let alone offered any help.

Good service example: My wife and I were at the car dealership today and in the span of 10 minutes at least half a dozen people came up to us and asked if someone was helping us or if we needed anything.

That’s one of the goals of our website watchbuy.com. We are striving to offer great customer service. If you love it, let us know, if not, we need to hear about that too.

The customer has so many choices these days. Even on the Internet it’s possible to get bad service. Many of us buy things that don’t show up, or when they do they aren’t what we expected. I like to deal with companies that actually care about the customer. When a business gets to big sometimes they lose sight of that. And we all know that there isn’t much we can do about it, except take our business elsewhere.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the guy or gal making minimum wage to breath the corporate message that the customer is important, but when I go to a business where I’m treated poorly, and six months later the door is locked and the "for lease" sign is in the window I wonder if that had something to do with it.
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George Siegal is the co-creator of watchnbuy.com. You can contact George at george@watchnbuy.com.

Am I Out Of Line Here?

One of my goals in designing a site like WatchNBuy is to eliminate the regular frustration I have when I’m out places and have to wait in line.

If the name of the game is to choose the line that will move the fastest, then I need to find a new game to play.

It was a day of making the wrong line choice like no other. It started at Starbucks at 7:30 am. I was faced with a choice, the walk-in or the drive-thru. There were about 10 cars in the drive through, so I figured I’ll park and go in. That was my first mistake of the day. When I got inside there were only two people ahead of me. The first lady must have been experiencing her first time in the coffee shop, she wasn’t quite sure what to get. So between the sweets and the lattes and all the various sizes she took about 6 minutes. The second guy was picking up breakfast for the office, 5 drinks and enough sweets to feed the band, another 8-minutes. By the time I got up there I got to experience the rare morning coffee moment, they needed to brew more. “Sorry sir, it’ll be about five minutes”. When I finally left with my coffee the drive through was empty.

Now it was off to the office for a few hours, then a drive over to the bank. The bank had 8 lines; only four were open, two were just for us commercial bank users. Two cars on the left, one on the right, this one was easy. No it wasn’t. The guy in front of me was doing some type of payroll deposit, and I sat there for 20 minutes. Meanwhile fresh cars whizzed in and out in the other three lines. Now you say, why don’t you switch lines? Great question until a car behind you boxes you in.

Later that day I stopped by the market on the way home. My mission: to grab a gallon of milk. Easy choice here, the express line 10 items or less. With only one person in front of me, this will be fast. Except this guy had 20 items, a slow checker, and no box person helping. Meanwhile the regular lines around me were humming right along. After they were finished with the guy who couldn’t count to ten, it was my turn, but wait, it was time for the dreaded checker switch. That’s when one checker gets off duty and the new person comes on. They have to rearrange the drawer and get settled in. If I had chosen the regular line I’d be home by now. I get up there and try to buy my one item; unfortunately since I just went to the bank all I had was a hundred dollar bill. The nice young lady who had just checked in for the day says, “I don’t have any twenties, I’ll have to give you fives and ones.” I said, “No thanks, could you please get some larger bills?” She had to go all the way to the back and get change, another five minutes, and she tried to make me feel bad about it in the process.

My day ended at the movie theater. If you think the post office can be slow, they take the people who failed the postal test, and any other test, and put them behind the food lines at the movie theater. My wife gets in one line, I get in the other. We’re both crawling along in our two dud lines while the other lines speed along. Finally we choose her line, and as the person in front of us gets Nachos, candy, a pickle, popcorn and three drinks, all the other lines are seeing fresh people. Ten minutes later, we got our popcorn (hold the grease) and went to find our seats.

It would be too simple to say the moral of this story was to “just shop on-line”, but that’s one of the reasons on-line shopping is becoming so popular. Staying home and using my computer would have kept me from feeling so out of line.
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George Siegal and Luis Ramirez are the creators of watchnbuy.com. You can contact George at george@watchnbuy.com or Luis at Luis@watchnbuy.com.

Why Is Online Shopping Becoming So Popular?

Statistics don’t lie, on-line shopping is booming, and by the year 2012 some experts predict it will be a 61 billion dollar business. So what are the reasons for this?

Convenience is one, you can sit in the comfort of your home or office and just buy stuff. It doesn’t matter what you are wearing, or how you look. No long lines with rude sweaty people all fighting to get in the shortest line. The line in your house is as long as the number of people waiting to use the computer, and you can usually control that.

I for one am sick of playing the guessing game of which line will move the fastest. I always get stuck with “new cashier” who has to look up every price, or annoying customer who when asked “Did you find everything you need” says no, so someone goes to get stuff they didn’t get while the rest of us wait. How about the person who realizes they actually need money when they finally get to the front of the line and they wait til then to start looking for it. What were they doing the last 10 minutes while they were waiting? I’ve had a strange throwback phenomena happening to me lately, people writing checks. Grab another magazine while you wait for this transaction to take place, three pieces of ID and a blood test later that transaction gets completed.

The beauty of buying on-line is getting to avoid all of the above. Sure nothing’s perfect, slow internet speed can be a pain, or you hit the “buy now” button after entering all your info and nothing happens, but those problems are much easier to deal with than actual people.

When I add up all the pros and cons, the pros win this one, staying home and shopping means the only screaming kids I have to deal with are mine, the lady with enough perfume sprayed on to fill a bathtub won’t make my head ache, nobody will be smoking around me, nobody arguing about mismarked prices, rude sales people, bad parking spots, or no parking spots. And best of all, when my credit card gets declined, nobody standing in front of me with a pair of scissors cutting my card in two. I feel like Dorothy clicking my heels together, when it comes to shopping, “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
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George Siegal and Luis Ramirez are the creators of watchnbuy.com. You can contact George at george@watchnbuy.com or Luis at Luis@watchnbuy.com.

Watching and Buying

I’ve always been fascinated by on-line shopping. How do people figure out what to sell on-line, then how do they get other people to buy what they are selling. I am a frequent user of Craigs List and Ebay, and am constantly amazed when someone puts and item on there that looks like it’s seen better days, they attach a price to it, and someone bids on it or buys it. One mans trash is another mans treasure. I saw one lady actually offering to rent a child safety strap that costs a hundred dollars. She had an ad posted offering to rent it for $25.

I’ve also spent time shopping on Amazon and Best Buy’s sites, and Gifts.com as well. As I went through those sites they always left me with the feeling that I’m watching, and I’m buying, but I’m not really watching because I’m only looking at pictures. So like the guy with the peanut butter who runs into the guy with the chocolate I thought, why not use video. And one step better, what if you could watch the video and actually click on the products you wanted to buy. A true merging of the terms watch and buy into one name, watchnbuy.com.

So that’s what my partner and I developed. An entire website devoted to watching videos and buying what you want. With internet sales soaring into the billions we’re hoping this becomes the next great way to shop on-line. We haven’t bought fancy sports cars yet, or second homes at the beach, but we hope it’s something people like and start taking advantage of.
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George Siegal and Luis Ramirez are the creators of watchnbuy.com. You can contact George at george@watchnbuy.com or Luis at Luis@watchnbuy.com.