Kevin Lee Search Engine Marketing Expert - News - Views

As I blog this, I’m on hold with Ikea. I love their stores and they have an enviable reputation in the world of retail. However, their eCommerce presence leaves a lot to be improved upon. It’s not so much their site as their process.

I placed an order online over the weekend and apparently something didn’t process. I got the following e-mail:
************************************************
Thank you for placing your recent IKEA order on our website.
Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties with our ordering system, we were unable to process it.

We would like to finish processing your order by phone. Please call us at (800)434-4532 to complete your order.
Order Date: 2/11/2006
Reference Number: (removed)

Our hours are:
Monday - Saturday, 8am - 12 Midnight EST
Sunday, 9am - 12 Midnight EST

We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for shopping with
IKEA, we do appreciate your business.
************************************************
It took over 15 calls to get something other than a busy signal on the toll free number. Then once I got through, it took 25 minutes of time on hold before talking to a rep who took my order number and placed me on hold never to return. It has now been 42 minutes. At this point it’s become more of a research project for me. After 3 minutes (4 minutes into the second hold cue), I got a prompt to leave a message. Instead I hit zero and was placed back into a hold cue. I gave up when I had to go to a meeting.

Call # 2 was placed in the evening at nearly 7PM. After 29 minutes I reached a human who looked up my order. It ends up that the shipment can’t be done by UPS and so the freight costs are about as much as the item, doubling the cost. Needless to say, I canceled the order. Don’t you think the website software could be written to know that certain items can’t be shipped via UPS ground?

There’s a lot of buzz around engagement as a new metric of advertising and media success. Often the disucssion includes a concept called co-creation, where the consumer participates in the creation of what the brand means to them. Does the Internet require that we create a new word to define how consumers interact with brands? Perhaps, but then isn’t the discussion I have in a Best Buy store a dialog just like a message board or blog?

Internet marketing veteran Rick Bruner must have gotten one too many spam messages in his mailbox before the Holidays. Plagued with SPAM (because few organizations use SPF or any other authentication method to allow for fool-proof SPAM filtering), Rick came up with an anti-SPAM T-shirt. Spam made my penis bigger. OK, so this may sound like a pro SPAM T-shirt, but I don’t think that those wearing it will in fact be endorsing the wonderful penis enlargement products Spamvertised. If the T-shirt is a success, I’m sure we can expect:
I got a great mortgage rate with SPAM
I made millions from Nigerian royalty in distress
SPAM Penny Stocks Made Me Million
Met My Spouse through Get-Laid Dating SPAM
I Love My SPAM Rolex