A school friend who now lives out in the US is getting married next month and on Sunday we were attempting to buy a couple of gifts from their online Macy’s wedding list. When it came to paying we tried a few different credit cards but each came back with an error message so we gave up and decided we would phone them later in the week. As we left the site I noticed that the items we had been trying to buy were now marked as taken which I thought was a little annoying. Then, in my inbox, I discovered three separate order confirmations, all for the same items!
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought that one of the main jobs of a wedding list would be to make sure that each item is bought once and once only! Still, when I clicked on the order status links in each message I just got back a 404 Object Not Found error so, what with the credit card error messages, I just assumed that the site didn’t understand the concept of transactions and the e-mail had been sent (and the items marked as taken) without actually completing the sale. Imagine then my horror when, on Monday I received three e-mails containing UPS tracking codes for three identical saucepans!
The order status links had magically started to work at this point so, the following day, I phoned Macy’s freephone number (courtesy of Skype). As usual for the US, the customer service was impeccable. They have arranged for two of the saucepans to be collected and cancelled the remainder of two of the orders. It remains to be seen quite what ends up on our credit cards though!