Today, I was checking for prices to ship a parcel abroad and found the most appalling situation ever: the logistics industry has gone mad. Trying different courier services' online price quotation service, I found that:
- UPS has an online presence that works reliably, as it always had. Their prices are not cheap, but one can at least get a quote after just a few clicks.
- DHL has an online express service called Ship Now ... which simply doesn't work. After inputing the origin address and moving over to the destination address field, one is left with a "busy" mouse pointer that never returns to allow someone to input the damn address. Repeated attempts at reloading the page did not succeed at improving the situation.
- FedEx has a Flash-based splash screen, meant for selecting the country of origin, that keeps on cycling during loading and never completes. Their "if you're having troubles viewing this page, click here" link at the bottom of the page simply calls a Javascript bit that... reloads the page. Erm... Right.
The result: two companies that lost potential business over a rather huge and costly parcel, simply because their websites prevents me from getting something as basic as a price quote. It really makes someone wonder, how the hell does that industry keeps itself afloat when they make their services so challenging to even access?
1 comment:
Hey Martin-Eric - the javascript refresh function on the fedex.com landing page actually is supposed to return a non-flash version when you click it. That probably could have been labelled better indeed. (and apparently the script isn't supported on all browsers either?)
(Disclosure... I work for FedEx, but wasn't involved in this project.)
In case you'd still like to request a rate quote, I can help out if you'd like.
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