Information Research Weblog

I see that the Financial Times, yesterday, was reporting a 20% rise in online shopping over the Christmas period in the UK, so I thought I'd report on my contribution and experience.

First, of course, one has to survey all of the price comparison sites, since most of them only include the stores that pay them. I discovered this a couple of months ago when I was looking for an iRiver mp3 player - it turned out the ShopGenie was the only one that included the high street store, Richer Sounds - and, as the local store is just five minutes walk away, it was actually more convenient to buy the device there. Actually, 'high street' is a bit of a misnomer - the company generally leases properties in cheaper parts of town, presumably this helps to keep its costs down.

However, I was also looking for a new scanner and online reviews persuaded me that instead of going for a Canon (my cameras and my printer are all Canon products) I should replace my old Epson scanner with a new one - the Epson Perfection 4870 Photo. This one draws plaudits for delivering near professional quality output at retail prices, and my reason for switching was to have a scanner that would help me reduce the decades of slides to digital storage. It turned out that Amazon.co.uk had the best price and immediate delivery - so I set it up yesterday and, although I have got to the slides yet, I am very pleased with its performance on, for example, OCR and copying prints. So - stars to Amazon for fast (and free!) delivery, and to Epson for a good product.

Of course, with more CDs to convert to mp3 (or, rather the .ogg standard in my case) and slides to convert, I'm obviously going to need more storage space, so the next thing on the list was a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB 7200rpm external hard drive. According to one or other of the shopping sites Dabs.co.uk had the best offer, but was out of stock. So, I had an e-mail conversation - or, rather, I tried to have an e-mail conversation, only to end up being told that the only information the company had about possible delivery dates was on their Website - the only problem was that, for this particular product, there was no information. Sorry, Dabs, but your customer relations policy is crap - you're off my list for ever. I then moved on the the next best deal at Technoworld and got all the way through to the point of ordering, when some database glitch sent me an error message - a totally unintelligible error message, of course. Again, an e-mail conversation ensued - this time they really were trying to be helpful, but the error message happened again, so I said goodbye to Technoworld - it you are going to sell online, get some software that works.

Back to the shopping sites and I discover that Komplett actually has a better deal than Technoworld - the order goes through without a hitch and now I'm sitting waiting - not for long, I hope. Interestingly, Komplett is a European company, based in Norway, operating in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK with a turnover in 2003 of 1,732,000,000 Norwegian Kroner (that's £148,207,359 at today's rate, or $277,310,790 - no doubt 2004 showed an improvement on that.

Finally, blank DVDs - back to Amazon, which turned out to have best price, instead of a number of other places recommended on various discussion groups - delivery is promised for Monday or Tuesday.

From a buyer's point of view is that Amazon has the best interface once one gets to the point of ordering and I have no doubt that its software must have been pretty pricey to develop. Other places I suspect of relying upon off-the-shelf packages of one kind of another and they may be letting the company down. If that interface is not easy to use and glitch-free, the consumer experiences a big turn-off.