A fellow Scouter forwarded me an announcement they received today about the opening of Coleman’s new online ecommerce store for Canada, http://www.colemanwebstore.ca!
I enjoy shopping online whenever I can, and we’re actually looking to upgrade some of the Cubs camping equipment soon. So off I go to the site..
First impression, not too bad, aesthetically it presents well, very easy to navigate, it’s just shopping, not much else, product lines are clearly displayed down the side menu. Well done..
Then I start going through the site… What a disaster! The first thing I went to was Stoves (cause we are looking to purchase one soon)… there is ONE Single Burner offering, that’s it, nothing more! Every page in the site has very limited product options. First thought, marketing must have jumped the gun on the release date and production is a bit behind the 8-ball on things… Well there’s NO indication on the site of more to come, or bear with us as we are still adding products etc. Nothing.
Over to the FAQ section, maybe there’s some notification in there.. you know what I found?
The product you are looking for may be temporarily out of stock or no longer available. We make every attempt to keep the site updated so that only items that are currently available are shown. However, if the item you wish to order becomes available again, we will post it on the site as soon as it is in stock.
Are you kidding me?! How to kill a website in one easy lesson…
If you are out of stock on a product and will be restocking it you show the product so people know you have it! Identify it as being out of stock currently and provide an approximate date for restocking! If the product is no longer going to be offered list it as NLA (no longer available). You don’t put up a website without content!
Worst case if Coleman is in the process of changing over their product lines they should have let us (the consumer) know about it up front.. A simple “Please excuse our limited selection at this time, as we are in the process of gearing up for our next season. If you can’t find what you are looking for please check back in X amount of time…”
Oh, and to top it all off I went to their feedback form.. typed up (a lot of what you see above) my feedback, clicked submit and received an invalid certificate notification, I went through the process to accept that, then had to resend and guess what! 404 error page not found.. their processing script for the feedback form didn’t work… LOL
They are lucky they are coleman and they have great products, I will be back, I just hope they get their act together!
A definite case to shake your head at…
3 Comments
Coleman is just a brand name that other companies license to market their products under. I’m not sure whether they make anything themselves.
We purchased a Coleman Spa last year. What we got was a Maax Spa. Maax was making the Coleman Spas, but they lost the contract to another company. We were offered a spa from the new company, but chose to stay with Maax. (We’re quite happy with it.)
From the limited number of products on the site, I’m guessing that it’s for just one of the companies who have licensed the Coleman name.
Coleman does manufacture many of their own products or has other companies manufacture to their specifications. http://www.colemancanada.ca/About_us/YesterYears/Default.en.aspx
That website came via Coleman newsletter.
i always like coleman products i recently brought the drip coffeepot for camping i had a problem with it and called coleman service dept. the service i got was terrible the person i talk to act like i was putting him out needless to say i spent a total of 45 minutes on the phone with no results i was so upset it almost make me not to buy another one of thier products again they should really work on thier people skills it was a real turn off for me