Ways to lose business

[xela]

I was googling wheelchairs (more on that later) and landed on karmanhealthcare.com I found the information about their various models and how they classify them useless in the usual way of marketing websites, but then noticed a link that said "Wheelchairs Catalog." Which I found encouraging, because companies that are in the habit of producing paper catalogs (even if now they only offer it as a pdf) usually developed that habit in the era when companies put actually useful information in their catalogs. And those that have retained the catalog habit have often also retained the habit of making their catalogs informative.

So I clicked on the link. Which took me to a page with what appeared to be an image of a table of contents. An image with no clickable links. And below that image, a form to fill out, headed with the following:

Please fill out the form below to receive information regarding your inquiry. You can give us a call at 1-800-80-KARMA, or please bare[sic] with us while we reply to your inquiry

It was the "bare" that was the last straw. Though the lack of a period at the end of the sentence added a nail to the coffin. My discovery that the apparent image was in fact some sort of frame or javascript widget which, when I happened to hover over its upper-right corner revealed a button that, if pushed, opened the entire catalog in its own tab, apparently even including a proper download link, came too late. If you can't be bothered to engineer your website for basic usability, why should I imagine your products are well engineered?

Comments

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

> If you can't be bothered to engineer your website for basic usability, why should I imagine your products are well engineered?

Because web design and physical/mechanical engineering are 2 ENTIRELY separate disciplines and talant at one says nothing about talent at the other?

[sammason.livejournal.com]

How annoying! I'm glad you noticed that company's fail before giving them your money. Are there shops for mobility aids where you are? That's how I chose my wheelchair.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Yes. But a sloppy website tells me a company's management is sloppy. That may not be reflected in everything the company does. But do I want to bet (in this case, something very close to literally) my life on it?

Surely there are companies — especially big companies — that pay more attention to putting on a good face than to putting out a good product. But when a specialty manufacturer takes pride in their presentation, I figure the odds are pretty good that it reflects the pride they take \in their work in general. And when they're sloppy about their presentation, I have to wonder how much pride they take in their work in general.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Yes, there are local stores. They tend to be quite small and sell only a few brands, so likely to have a built-in conflict of interest if what's best for me happens not to be something they sell. So I'm treating this as I would treat shopping for any other moderately complex engineered product where I'm not already an expert in the field: Research what's available, from sources that are either genuinely neutral or forthrightly biased. (For the latter, old-fashioned manufacturer's catalogs can be fantastic sources of information. Of course they're biased, but the bias is declared in great big letters right on the front: Acme Power Tools, 2015. As for the former, they can be damned hard to find. If I were shopping for, say, a woodworker's lathe, I'd spend a fair amount of time reading woodworkers' forums, looking for what experienced people had to say about various tools. But in this case: Even if I could find a wheelchair users' forum, how likely am I to find one where the experienced members of the forum have 100 or more hours experience with each of a dozen or so tools? However honest people's opinions, they're unlikely to actually be all that useful without that sort of breadth of experience.

So in this particular case, I think my main tool is going to have to be manufacthrers' catalogs. And a finely tuned nose for bullshit.