Recently I was online seeking a specific product at Walmart to festoon my house for the holidays. Last year during the post holiday clearances we came across some pretty cool icicle style star lights. We grabbed 3 boxes and stowed them away for use this year. After doing some measurements recently we realized we’re going to need a couple more boxes. I found the product on Walmart’s website, except the price was jacked up to some astronomical price, $60 for an 8 foot strand of lights. Then I noticed the exact same lights in a snowflake shape were listed for $10. Obviously, this is an error in pricing, a simple data entry screw-up.
Upon closer inspection of the page I find a couple other customers have made use of the “ask a question” feature to pose the same query “What’s up with the $60 stars?” The questions were unanswered, the price remained incorrect, 3 weeks after the original poster, and 2 weeks after the second.
This is a great example of why if you are going to use “Web 2.0″ style features like customer interaction, you HAVE to support it. In this case supporting it means actually paying attention to the customer interaction on your own site. Here people are asking direct questions and for nearly 3 weeks, nothing has been done. That is way too long for a 600% pricing error to go uncorrected, much less in light of that multiple customers have actively reached out using the tools you provided them to help you in this case.
When I look at the module that the other customers are using to ask questions, I see it gives ME, another customer, the option to answer the question. At this point, I think I have to assume that is what they intend, have other customers answer the questions and the vendor will just flat out ignore them.
That’s a complete failure to seize the opportunity here to not continue to lose sales due to a basic data entry error. How much money was lost due to people being turned away by this pricing issue? I guarantee you it was a heck of a lot more than it would have cost for someone to spend the time to look at customers’ questions!
8 Comments
And, if I remember correctly, the first person stated that he wished to buy MULTIPLE strands of lights. Big sale loss there – you have no idea how many lights this guy could have needed!
Why am I not surprised that Walmart didn’t respond to any of their ads?? I once stood in a Walmart waiting for over 15 minutes for them to tell me they were sold out of Guitar Hero III! No worries, I found it at Target.
Terry- I just bought 12 boxes of those stars. Did you have any problems getting yours to light?? I checked them before I hung them. I spent 2 mornings putting them up and half of them aren’t lighting. Tried changing fuses. If one bulb is out, will the whole star go out.. I am so mad at myself for spending this money on something that is apparently a piece of crap.
thanks
@Tana: Mine worked fine, both the ones we bought last year and stowed away and the 3 new boxes we picked up last week in store. We didn’t have them shipped, so not sure if that’s a factor for you, but they worked perfectly fine for us. They look to be just your standard mini lights attached to a star frame, which would mean that yes, if one bulb is burnt out that strand should stay lit. However, if one bulb is not seated properly or missing entirely, then the strand will not work. This would affect any lights further down the line as well, so I would kind of wiggle and check each bulb starting where the lights stop working. Your problem will be on that first “out” strand.
Keep in mind too these lights have settings, I don’t think there is an “off” setting, but worth a quick check. For what it’s worth, these lights look really cool, especially on the fade setting that makes them sort of randomly fade in and out.
Ok, thanks. I checked the out stars yesterday. One thing I realized is that you are only supposed to hook 3 sets up together? Are yours all together? I tried running extension cords from individual sets of 3 and still had problems (I spent a crazy amount of time on this) I hate to take them down. Yes, I bet they look good.
thanks again
Tana
@Tana: I would check the bulbs, make sure they are in firmly. I have 5 running in one continuous strand with no problem. Also, putting an extension cord between strands would only make the possible issue of a weakened current worse.
thanks,
my dad’s going to take a look.
Tana
P.C.
Update: Looks like Walmart has removed the question feature altogether.