Target.com: Inventory like it’s 1999!
I like online shopping – I do it a lot. I’ll admit that Amazon.Com has me hooked and I’d spend even more money there if the wife wouldn’t cut my fingers off at the core as a result. Target.Com is a new one for me to visit though. Done the retail store (a lot) and like it a lot (beats Wally World any day of the week), but their online inventory leaves something to be desired.
They try hard hard – real hard. When an item’s in stock they not only tell you that but also which Aisle it’s in (or endcap thereof). Real nice and useful however a total FAIL when it comes to reliability.
For me if your data’s not 100% correct it’s not worth pushing. And in Target’s case they seem to have an issue with the number of items on hand bit. Depending on whom we spoke to (wither store or via the phone) that figure could be 24 hours or even more out of date ; The web site continued to proudly inform us that our local Target had a particular item in stock even when it didn’t. Even checking over 24 hours later it still told us it was available even though it wasn’t.
This effect reminds me of a crowd I did some Sql Work for late in the last c. whilst I was still in the UK. Their name shall remain known only to me and them, however the story’s true. This crowd wanted an online system to punt their wares to Joe Consumer – all wizzywzggy flash driven utilizing Sql Server on the front and back end with replication to handle to the orders. Real nice right up to the point when there order’s then ended up on a printer somewhere awaiting an operator to actually input the order to the mainframe ‘at some later point’. This of course meant the at any point in time the inventory could could vary from accurate to ‘just a stab in the dark’.
I was reminded of this antiquated hand-cranked this system with my experience at Target; if you’re going to have an inventory indicator then it’d had better be accurate to, I don’t know, the last 60 minutes at least or else it devalues the web site forcing the consumer to have to resort to the phone to double check the inventory prior to (in our case) traipsing out in the bloody snow and cold).
