Monday, October 10, 2005
Lack of Mr. Delivery
Hello Good morning and how do you do – this is Cybersurf, your very own Internet update. I am Steven Lang.
Very often, we hear the people are not happy with government because of a lack of delivery. Sometimes, people are not happy with the Internet for the very same reason – a lack of delivery.
Let me explain what I mean with a personal example, on Friday we thought it would be great if we could order some take out food on the Internet and have it delivered to our home.
My wife easily found the Mr. Delivery web site and we were very favourably impressed – in fact it is one of the most functional sites I have seen.
It is lightening fast and intuitive. Instantly we found the nearest Mr. Delivery franchise and we could browse through the menus of all the restaurants in our area.
Mr. Delivery dot com is a fantastic site – we were a little perturbed when the site informed us that delivery would take an hour – a phone request normally takes 45 minutes.
We were hungry.
After about half an hour, Mr. Delivery phones to confirm the order and informs us that it will take about another hour and a half to complete our order. Why?
“Because we only got your order now”.
Needless to say – we cancelled the order. My wife got in her car and within thirty minutes we were enjoying our Pizza.
The point of this story is self evident – it doesn’t matter how good your site is if you don’t deliver the goods. We can’t eat virtual pizzas – not yet anyway.
The problem with delivery might also have something to do with the recent Kalahari dot net campaign – where they go to great lengths to convince TV viewers that they do deliver – really!
In recent years, I have received quite a few complaints from listeners who have been very unhappy with service delivery from Kalahari dot net – perhaps their new campaign is telling us that they have recognised the problem and done something about it.
Anyway the debate over whether it is better to buy books online from Kalahari dot net or amazon dot com is still raging.
The list price and range of books are better at amazon dot com but delivery does take a long time and invariably you have to pay customs duty on your purchases.
And with that we wrap today’s edition of Cybersurf – thanks for listening and remember to keeeeeep on surfing.
