I just went to buy some reasonably cheap light bulbs on eBay and got the shock of my life courtesy of the eBay Shopping Basket.
I clicked the “Add to Basket” link for a £7.99 item and up flashed a box telling me the total was £57.97.
The reason is I’d added a £39.99 item with £9.99 carriage to my basket about a week ago and totally forgotten about the potential purchase. eBay hadn’t though and the item was still waiting for me to check out and pay.
The only thing to indicate that the basket total was for more than the purchase I was currently making is the small print saying “Basket Summary (2 Items)“. Instead of scaring me with the basket total, it would be better if eBay highlighted the item price in bold and a larger font indicating the actual £7.99 buy price.
This is the first criticism I’ve had of the eBay shopping basket experience, but it’s one which could deter buyers from completing a purchase. It made me stop and double check just how much I was paying for this transaction and I’ve now removed the offending item from the shopping basket. Lesson learnt – I’ll go back to adding potential purchases to my Watch List instead of leaving them languishing in my shopping basket.
2 Responses
we had a very confused customer last week, couldn’t work out why our invoice was so much less than she was being asked to pay. Neither could we.
Turned out it was a shopping basket invoice that included a purchase from another seller. Once that was realised it was fine, but there was no way for us to realise we were being added in to a basket, and so we wasted time trying to sort out a problem that wasn’t a problem….
Be nice if we could get a small notification of some kind that this particular item was going to be part of a larger basket, so that we knew how to advise our customer.
Amazon has a similar problem. I occasionally add items to my shopping basket there to test one of my programs for accuracy. Apparently things don’t expire from the basket and I’ve seen stuff from months ago still in it. I would think that after a few months of not going through checkout that Amazon would get the hint that I wasn’t really interested in purchasing the product.