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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

I tried ordering some things from Home Depot the other day, and they silently cancelled half of my order while still charging me the same amount for delivery from the store and while saying that some things can only be delivered from a warehouse and that some things can only be delivered from a specific store and that delivery from each store has a $45 minimum purchase before they'll even consider delivery despite the fact that they're charging the same amount for delivery from the store no matter how much you order. That of course makes it difficult to then order the remaining items even if you call them and demand a refund for the first delivery fee, because the remaining items now don't meet the minimum. Then the delivery from the warehouse is some weird arbitrary calculation involving a nominal+ amount that then gets divided up across the items you're ordering (3.77 here, 2.83 there, and so on) such that if you remove any item the delivery fees for the other items all go up, and then there are some items that deliver for free if you order more than $45 worth from the warehouse which of course doesn't help you if some items can only be purchased from the individual stores. And then there are still things like cans of spraypaint that you can't get delivered at all and you're only allowed to pick up in person.

I know that right now is an exceptional time, but this kind of shopping experience is part of why people choose Amazon first.

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I ordered a chest freezer from Home Depot. When I ordered it, I double checked that it was not listed as out of stock. I got a notice they were delivering on April 4. It was never delivered. The delivery company told me they were never shipped the freezer to deliver. When I called Home Depot, they said freezers are on back order to June. They told me I could call the manufacturer. This is a bit crazy. I have never had a place tell me to call the manufacturer.

> This is a bit crazy. I have never had a place tell me to call the manufacturer.

I bought a stand mixer from John Lewis, a British department store with a (arguably fading) reputation for better service, its own 5y plus guarantees, etc.

When I needed to call ok that guarantee for a replacement part, I had two months of email run around before getting a reference number and phone number for the manufacturer's UK distributor.

It was a further 3.5 months of calling the distributor, being promised it was on its way, and on occasion receiving the wrong part (once) or no part (twice).

When I complained to JLP about the experience, that I didn't feel I should have to contact some third-party distributor/wholesaler for assistance in a claim under the guarantee agreement with itself, I just got fobbed off with an email telling me to phone the number their colleague had already sent me, as if I hadn't read the email - comically ironic since it was clear from my own complaint that I had; so it was my email that hadn't been read.

Anyway, rant over. Moral: if you're in the UK, JLP not what it was, think twice for purchases where guarantee relevant; relevance: I only very thinly veiled my description of how much better its 'online competitor' is in handling returns/replacements.

John Lewis: 5.5 months emails, calls, waiting for a £20 replacement part.

Amazon: 2 minute chat and until next day wait for a whole product (~£150) replacement due to defective (~£10) part. Original to be returned ~at leisure.

Honestly even if Amazon's a few quid more expensive (at that price point), which it typically isn't, I'm at the point where I choose it just because it isn't painful when it doesn't go completely smoothly.

I had a very similar issue with trying to get a replacement part for a JL nursing chair. The JL customer support staff seemed to see their job as being to find reasons to justify not helping me, presumably to save their company a few pounds.

I am happy even to pay extra to buy from Amazon because I know that if there is a problem they will delight me with their response.

As someone who just got off the phone with Lowes not an hour ago with a very similar appliance delivery issue, I took a little solace in your comment since I at least feel like I didn't just choose the wrong hardware store.

With that said, the problems with my order are somewhat mind boggling. I received an email notifying me that my appliance would be delivered on 4/7 and to be home in a 12hr window. When I, by luck, contacted the store to talk about another problem I'm having with this order they informed me it will likely be another 5-8 days until its actually delivered and that this is a known issue with their system. How does a known issue where you're telling your customers to be home for a delivery on a day a week+ removed from the actual delivery survive for long enough for it to be common knowledge?

This should be obvious to you now, but all Home Depots are out of chest freezers. Same with masks and many gloves.

For the issues with ordering, Home Depot ordering systems are truly a mess. There is very little automation after your order is sent to the store. The order system (ESVS) is also just a UX nightmare, making it difficult to do anything beyond a very specific workflow.

My personal favorite bit of insanity is we list certain prices online that aren't available in store. If you go to check out and want that price in store you have to order it online and wait for it to show up in our system. Then you can pick it up at the service desk. Even if it's in your hand.

I had the same experience with Lowe’s. My takeaway was that nobody really cares about online orders bc they are a tiny fraction of Lowe’s business. When you call them, they direct online orders to a different extension - that told me right away the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.

Exactly the same thing happened to me with Office Max. I told them to cancel.

I had to place orders with three companies for me to actually get a freezer. Walmart was the only one that came through. Freezers are a hot commodity!

HomeDepot's ecommerce is a joke. Not only the shopping experience is poor, they treat logistics as if they were doing you a favor. And, on top of all that, you get damaged items. I made 7 purchases and all 7, in different periods of time, had to be returned or replaced.

Same for Lowe's. There's a reason people shop on Amazon. Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce.

I beg to differ. Rock Auto is where it's at for auto parts. The website is ugly as hammered shit, but it's fast, shows you the options grouped by rough quality level (economy/you cheapskate, daily driver, performance, etc), shows you what part to select so it ships from the same warehouse as the parts already in your cart and saves you shipping, and returns are painless (disclaimer: I've only ever done returns for core exchanges). I have never had a better online purchasing experience.

And the prices are a fraction of what you pay at a brick and mortar place. Especially for e.g. wiper blades.

Companies that "get" e-commerce are out there, but a lot of them are quietly and competently doing their thing in unsexy domains and aren't trying to eat the whole pie.

Rock Auto, for instance, isn't trying to serve every idiot on the planet with a car. If you can't keep your lefts/rights and fronts/backs straight when ordering e.g. brake hoses, you're going to find it a frustrating experience. Putting up a (small) barrier to entry to keep out the least clueful people probably helps keep their costs down.

Not affiliated, just a very happy repeat customer.

My nomination is McMaster-Carr (mcmaster.com) - They have a huge catalog of parts/tools yet somehow it's so intuitive to browse. I was a mechanical engineer in a previous life and McMaster's website was my bible. Step one for any new prototype design was to browse this site. Best case scenario, you could cobble together your prototype from various COTS (commercial off the shelf) McMaster parts. And if that wasn't an option, scan the catalog for necessary parts and raw materials. If they don't exist at McMaster, your design idea just got at least 10X expensive and lead time doubled.

I was always shocked by McMaster-Carr's delivery speed. I felt like the parts would arrive as quickly as I could have conceivably picked them up.

This was 10 years ago now, so sort of like Amazon Prime before it became ubiquitous, but for materials and tools. However McMaster was and remains much better organized and much better spec-ed.

That's because they already have to delivery that fast for car repair shops. Fast delivery has never been an extra for them, it's always been the core product.

What's interesting is that considering the existing logistics, none of these guys though of expanding into other ecommerce earlier. One of them could have been Amazon...

I'm glad they didn't to be honest. It would have diluted their existing product.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Amazon is re-solving problems that traditional supply chain companies like McMaster-Carr solved 1-2 decades ago. It would be fascinating to read a case study comparing the two.

Amazon is trying to shed all possible liability as a merchant and collect their 15% or whatever rent, since that’s where the margins are. That’s at odds with what I’m looking for as a buyer, which is a seller that will vet and stand behind their products.

As any reasonable, educated consumer would be.

I would like to know if a McMaster-Carr, Grainger, et al had fallen into the same traps Amazon has when it comes to supply chain and if eventually Amazon will be shaped into a similar company & business model.

Amazon's actions make it clear that the company's goal is not to provide the customer with products of a minimum and consistent quality, nor is it to make it easy for customers to even purchase products from Amazon.com. Note how they hide the option to filter for only products shipped and sold by Amazon.com

Amazon knows that retail margins are tiny, a few percent at best, and that is not what they are interested in. It takes a lot of labor to provide high quality vetting and constant vigilance over suppliers. What they are interested in is high margins, which comes from being a platform.

I don't think McMaster Carr or Grainger ever had any intention of becoming platforms for resellers so they could take a top line cut of sales and outsource quality control.

If anything, I think Amazon is probably trying to reduce their shipped and sold by Amazon.com retail operations and focus on the high margin web services. Why compete with Walmart/Target/Best Buy/Home Depot/Lowes for <5% profit margin with huge liabilities when you can make 20%+ easy on super scalable web services?

Once, circa 2006, I ordered some rubber tubing from McMaster-Carr in the morning. It was shipped it from New Jersey to western Maryland, where I lived, by that afternoon.

Same, gets there practically as soon as the call is hung up, their catalog has everything, and their websites search function is intuitive and efficient

I like McMaster-Carr, but I often hear them being held up as a positive UX example when, in my experience, their website is endlessly frustrating. They often force you into choosing arbitrary categories too early, break tabbed browsing expectations, and have a frustrating mix of metric and imperial measurements that can't be escaped. Their pricing is also generally at quite a premium.

For example, let's say I want a piece of hollow metal cylinder (any metal, to be determined later based on cost and availability), with an ID of around 12 mm and a wall thickness of at least 5 mm, at least 150 mm long. It ends up being a needlessly frustrating experience even for such a simple item.

I know what you mean, and I can say that most of the categorization, which may seem arbitrary, reasonably comes from how those items are manufactured and used historically. An example is pipe versus tube; they are measured differently and have differences in ranges of wall thickness, precision and so on, because different needs and processes developed between pipes that carry fluids vs structural tubing. Most but not all people are going to want one category or another based on intended use, and probably have a highly-available size/thickness in mind already, too.

Getting things custom made is expensive, so customers are pressured to use what's widely available. Stocking lots of things not widely purchased is also expensive. These forces have been working for a long time to give us a pretty wide selection that covers most uses.

I know that pipe and tube have different specifications and applications -- that's specifically why I picked this example. But those differences don't always apply to me. I'd prefer a UI with a check box for pipe, tube, or both, because sometimes I want my search to cover both things. Maybe I want to use a pipe as a paperweight or an art piece or whatever. If McMaster could accurately guess what I was going to use something for, my employer wouldn't need me.

Intelligent search of physical parts is something I've thought a bit about before, in a different context. Often times people with a lot of car knowledge can point out interchangeable items that manufacturers don't come out and acknowledge as being interchangeable.

Examples: Oil filters are often differently sized but still interchangeable between models. You can use an Aisin-built airflow meter from a 90s Mazda to replace one in a Toyota, even though they're different housings, and it would work (if not perfectly) because it's essentially the same part with the same electronics. Brakes and suspension parts often interchange across many models, with the possibility of 'upgrading' to heavier duty parts from more expensive models.

Anyway, it'd be great if you could combine a lot of data and NLP to search off-the-shelf parts based on parameters of varying specificity. Anything from "made of metal and roughly x/y/z dimensions" to "shares the same bolt pattern as part # on a joining surface" could be made searchable in theory.

Having used McMaster-Carr for over a decade, I strongly agree about the filtering being non-ideal and also the prices being high. There's an interaction between the two as well: You can't sort by price. Often there are many items meeting the specs I want but I just want to see which ones are the cheapest. At the moment I skim everything, making notes about candidates, and them manually compare them on price.

Yes, this exactly. This causes searches to take hours for simple things. Sometimes if I look in "steel" expecting to find something cheap, the only part matching my dimensions is military-grade superalloy tool steel that costs a fortune, so I have to go back and look again in "stainless steel" where there's perhaps a reasonable price.

Unfortunately McMaster-Carr won't deal with Canadian companies they believe could be associated with the cannabis industry "due to US Federal Laws". I've been at two companies where we've placed an order with them, then had it immediately cancelled. Only after following up did I learn the reason.

When I tried to re-order through my personal company (not in any way cannabis-related) I was told I'm not a big enough company for them to deal with (and they cancelled the order).

From a CAD/dimensional standpoint, their website is a goldmine. I just wish they would take my money.

If we started to include McMaster-Carr I would also say I have very good experience with Digi-key and Mouser.

My main experience with their site is the incredibly aggressive and trigger-happy bot filter. If you reload a page a few times due to a bad connection, they block you. Not "solve this captcha to continue", just "go away, we're not letting you in".

Can anyone nominate an Australian equivalent to mcmaster.com ? I am prototyping something and would love to have a lost of available parts to troll through with prices.

I only ordered from the once but IIRC they don't tell you what shipping costs until AFTER you place your order. That seemed a bit crazy to me

The McMaster-Carr website is one of the finest examples of UX on the internet. Also they did next-day delivery literally decades before Amazon.

Can you use it as an i dividual or bussinesses only?

RockAuto's easily navigable catalog is what has gotten them $5000+ in sales from me over the years.

Autozone / NAPA try, but the catalogs are clunky and require many page loads to navigate to a given item. Once you find an item, it's a crapshoot whether the listing will be items that are actually for sale at a store near me. Half the time the first 5 items will be "generic" parts that don't actually fit my car anyway.

RockAuto lets you drill down to the exact part you need, compare 5+ different brands on the spot and add it to the cart without ever changing pages. It's a real triumph of slim web design.

I hope Rock Auto never replaces their website. Sure I have to scroll down the whole page to find my manufacturer in the alphabetical sidebar listing, and then open the nested categories like I'm looking for a folder in Windows 3.1, but once I get there I find a list of parts that I know will fit my car arranged so I can tell the quality vs. price trade-offs.

I used to look for parts on Advance and O'Reilly's sites, half of the time it seemed the search results would have parts that wouldn't fit my car. So I really like the way that RA's nested folder structure ensures the most important constraint (compatibility) is met during the search.

Overall I agree, but I've found it wise to cross-reference their part numbers as they are sometimes wrong for lower volume models. Eg: offering standard Ford Focus brake pads when the model searched is a Focus ST

Try the search. Its phenomenal. And then when you click enter, the next search box that appears. And then the filter box. I dont ever have to scroll on the rock auto page.

I'll second Rock Auto. A dated looking website that Just Works (TM).

Parts-tree another great one, focused on yard maintenance equipment.

Ace hardware is kind of neat. I ordered some stuff as Christmas presents and the local store called me on the phone to ask if I was going to be home and where would I like them to put the items. I asked if they could stick them in the garage and maybe in some generic looking boxes to preserve the surprise (of being presents) and the boxes all showed up neatly hand wrapped in brown paper! Only one data point but definitely made me feel like ordering again.

I'll go a step further on the interface. It's one of the best shopping experiences online. Ive noticed this about auto part stores POS systems, but rock auto especially, is something special.

You can use the search to REFINE as you search. Start by typing Toyota Camry YEAR and 2.4L if you want. It will keep making suggestions but you can click enter. Then you have a tree to select from OR you can use the new search box that appears to keep searching just in that tree. Then when you get to a category, a third search box appears you can use to filter the results. It's honestly amazing how fast you can search for things. There was another comment about having to scroll a lot, but that's the slow way to use the site.

Rock Auto is one of those sites that will never work as well if it became "mobile first." Like craigslist and photoshop, and the old facebook, its beauty is in its density and how quick you can navigate and drill.

I've also had great experiences with Rock Auto. I've been ordering the occasional part from them for about 10 years. Shipping can be expensive but everything comes pretty quick.

Some parts are cheap but they're also inexpensive.

Yeah, I try to bundle things up to save on shipping. On the other hand, by the time I need anything, I probably also need wiper blades, and the price difference on just one wiper blade usually covers the cost of shipping.

Also, one that many here should be familiar here with: Newegg.

Walmart shipping is pretty on point as well, and you don't need to pay 120$ a year for 2 day shipping.

Newegg has a good website, but their customer service and return policy is not up to par with other retailers and I have started buying from other vendors if the price is remotely close for this reason.

Yeah I pay more for an amazon monitor or anything that could be defective. Newegg return policies are so bad I pay extra to go elsewhere

Their website is one of the clearest and easiest to navigate parts website I've ever come across. I just wish there was an equivalent for motorcycles.

Bikebandit's website isn't too bad after you figure out how to select your bike.

This is why I read HN. Thank you for recommending a good retailer.

My favorite parts site is PartsGeek. Pretty easy to find what I want and every product has a picture so I can make sure it matches what I need. Never had a bad experience with them.

I like NAPA/Oreilly where you can see whats in a store and have them set the parts aside for you so they are there when you get there.

Advance and I believe Autozone also let you place orders for in-store pickup. At one point, Advance was putting a coupon code right at the top of the homepage that would save you 20% off your order if you did that.

Best Buy is great, especially for delivery.

Apple, CostCo, Ashley Home Funiture, Wayfair, Wal-Mart, and some minor players, have all performed well in my usage and those who I know also use them. Now with two I had a damaged item they did not want any part of returned, apparently this is common with free shipping deals as the return shipping for larger items can be ridiculous.

Home Depot I have to agree with assessments others have made, lost an item off their own dock and when recreating the order after two weeks of back and forth; UPS was getting annoyed too, they wanted to remake the order and charge full shipping again. Just really bad customer service. They really do act like all screw ups are yours.

> Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce

Target.com is a pretty solid experience.

Walmart.com is also surprisingly good.

Although I'm sure people can provide horror stories for both retailers.

Walmart still suffers the same problem Amazon has with 3rd party sellers. Quality can vary greatly depending on who you're buying from on their platform.

Target and Best Buy definitely nailed it.

Walmart has been spot on with both their delivery as well pickup-in-store items. I wish they installed FREEZER SILOS at all of their locations for their pickup-in-store FROZEN foods that can be ordered online. Right now only select places have them. You cant order frozen foods online at the rest of the locations. But otherwise they have been great with all of my orders.

HomeDepot and Lowes are a joke. HomeDepot.com even tried to sneak in a 'handling fee' at the checkout ( paraphrasing I forget what they called it ) for a small kitchen appliance though it said 'free shipping' at first glance next to the item description.

If you have an ad blocker.

Target sells ad space to random 3rd parties.

I've personally had a lot of issues with Walmart.com.

Their inventory data seems to be a bit messy, I've seen a lot of product names/images/descriptions that are clearly messed up, and on more than a few occasions, I've received a single item when the listing said it was a multi-pack. Also, some of the inventory counts are a bit weird -- sometimes an item will show in-stock on the product page, but not in the cart, at the same time.

In the past I had a lot of issues with their shipping, but they seem to have mostly fixed those. Stuff like those huge stickers over important parts of the product, or improper packing.

We have been trying to use Walmart for groceries, it is okay, but too often they substitute what we don't want. There is a reason we ordered mild not spicy: the kids won't eat spicy hot foods.

We have had great experiences with Krogers substitutions. Usually, the substitute with a greater quantity for the same price or better quality.

I'll toss Staples on to there. I ordered a chair two years ago. Relatively modern website, free delivery, and it arrived earlier than anticipated with no damage. Just make sure you unsubscribe from their newsletter.

I also think they'll price-match.

I've had nothing but excellent experiences ordering online from staples, although their email notifications leave something to be desired. I've learned to just trust that my package is actually on the way now, but usually I get the "your package has shipped" email some time after I actually get the package, if I get a notification at all.

I was surprised when I ordered from Staples.com a week or two ago. They have a top-tier e-commerce experience, fast shipping (I think my free one-day shipping was a temporary quarantine thing), and they seem to be better at packing than Amazon.

newegg.com is great. They primarily sell computers and office equipment, but if I'm buying that stuff, it's my go-to. Fast delivery, fantastic customer service. If something is defective, they'll send you a replacement with a return shipping label, no questions asked. Been using them for nearly 20 years without a single complaint.

10 years ago I used Newegg a ton, but with third party items now mixed into their store, I find shopping there a bit more of a dice roll.

I always press the "Seller: Newegg" button. This way I never get counterfeit stuff. On the other hand, specifying the seller to be Amazon on Amazon.com sometimes yields third party products in disguise.

Amazon suffers from that as well. I'm loath to buy anything from Amazon, Newegg, or any other retailer when it comes from a third party seller. As far as I know, that's always indicated on the product page. They don't hide it, but they don't aggressively inform you either.

Since Amazon commingles inventory, it doesn’t matter if it says shipped and sold by Amazon since the item you get could still be supplied by a third party.

I have decent luck with Microcenter as a Newegg substitution. + if you live in some cities, they have brick and mortar

Hmm? Newegg is a Microcenter alternative if you live too far away.

100 percent this. I dropped NewEgg when they added third party sellers.

I was just comparison shopping for an HDMI adapter across Amazon, NewEgg and Bestbuy. Out of the 3 I found NewEgg still to be the best even with the 3rd party sellers mixed in. Amazon the quality looked super sketchy for some of this stuff and for Bestbuy the website had loading problems, an unintuitive UI for store selection (and put me into a store in CA for some reason even though I'm nowhere near there and had no VPN).

Monoprice is a good place to go for adapters and cables and such.

Thanks, I'll check them out

Their return policies are not good. Amazon will take things back, without fuss. Newegg will charge a very hefty restocking fee, or might not even take it back at all. It is very unfortunate to see this have happen, because I remember in the early 00's they built their business on providing the exact opposite kind of experience to that kind of nickle-and-dime technique that was commonplace at the time.

Yeah I got a pair of raspberry pie to play with running Kubernetes on bare metal while I’m stuck at home. No delay no extra shipping cost.

Walmart has been quite reliable for grocery pickup. I’ve tried Hy-Vee and the experience wasn’t very good. Lots of stuff sold out or not picked. Target has given up on grocery curbside as well. But for household goods it works well. I’m trying our local supermarket curbside next so hopefully that will work out. I know we are in crazy times but I’d be really cool to get a dedicated grocery curbside / delivery operation with only warehouses and no stores. I think the UK has something like that.

That’s crazy. Target smokes Amazon for most things these days, especially with pickup. Ditto for NewEgg and Walmart.

Amazon is increasingly overrated, they peaked a decade ago and have declined to a warehouse club/flea market.

Newegg and Walmart have fallen to the same thing Amazon has: allowing 3rd party sellers.

They're not as far along, but going down that path is what causes so many issues with counterfeits and generally poor experiences. I accidentally bought some thermal paste from a newegg seller who shipped it via slow-boat-from-china, and it took weeks to get to me. It was technically listed, but I hate any shopping experience that forces me to be on high alert not to get screwed (as minor as super-slow shipping is).

AFAIK Amazon is the only online retailer that commingles their own inventory with 3rd-party sellers, making it impossible to avoid counterfeits.

Target is getting into the 3rd party seller game through Target+. It appears they have a pretty tight process for what gets approved to sell and who gets to sell it. Target by culture is extremely intentional about what they allow on their shelves, and it appears they are following suit with their 'curated' 3rd party sellers.

I honestly don't understand the 3rd party seller thing.

I went from buying almost all PC parts from NewEgg (without even bothering to price shop), to pretty much avoiding the site entirely.

If you look at almost any of the 3rd party sellers' pages and sort by rating, you'll pretty much see the same pattern on all: a tiny handful of 4-5 star reviews, 1 star reviews by the bottom of page 1, and the remaining 80 pages of products have no reviews at all.

Is this really helping Walmart/NewEgg/Amazon/etc vs them just selling the same products directly themselves? Why do this -- are they just trying to avoid these sellers starting competing no-name e-commerce sites?

> Is this really helping Walmart/NewEgg/Amazon/etc vs them just selling the same products directly themselves? Why do this -- are they just trying to avoid these sellers starting competing no-name e-commerce sites?

My thought would be this allows them to pivot from being a "logistics" company to being a "tech" company, providing a "platform" for others.

Walmart website is still stuck in 08. I have to search for things 3 different ways and even then I can’t seem to get one search page to list products of the same type

I assist a small drop ship supplier listing their product in Home Depot. Their item management system is absolutely the pits, and requires the use of awful protected excel worksheets in order to get mass data in and out of the system. All the product syndication systems that they recommend are obnoxiously expensive for the amount of SKUs we need to maintain due to product variants.

Overstock & Wayfair are way easier to work with by comparison.

I thought the same thing about Home Depot until this hit. I've had the opposite experience with them the last few weeks. Things come quickly, my cart is consistent wherever I am logged in, and I can just add pretty much as much stuff as I want and get it all delivered the next day for $9. I'm loving the express delivery. In general it would always be worth it for me to spend $9 to get stuff delivered from Home Depot. Pre-pandemic it's a solid hour or more in the car to cover the 4.3 miles there and back from my house.

Maybe I'm getting a better experience because I'm in Atlanta and there's a bit of a headquarters halo effect.

Their search and general catalog organization isn't great. I just use Google as my entrance to their site and that makes life easier.

Nordstrom does it well. I buy shirts and things and they arrive reasonably packaged, and include a return print out ready to go. Returning an item is as simple as putting the print out on the outside of a box and leaving it for the mail collector.

Chain Reaction Cycles for bike gear is unmatched, and outdoes Amazon by a mile.

Search, sorting and faceting features are unmatched: Looking for a pair of handlebars: you can filter by material, colour, width, diameter, rise, sweep, brand, stock level, price. Need some wheels, specifically a wheel set that has a 25mm internal rim diameter, for road biking, disc brake compatible, with 6 bolt disc mounts, 28 spokes, made of carbon fibre, in stock, and then arranged by discount level? Then want to buy it for an actual reasonable price, and receive it within a calendar week (pretty great considering I'm on the opposite side of the world), then CRC is literally unmatched.

Components etc are sensibly, correctly and consistently arranged by type and feature in a way that makes me wish every other online retailer would take several pages out of their book.

I've hunted for bike components on Amazon, it was a painful experience that resulted in a lot of manual searching, going between several pages trying to compare between half a dozen differently formatted and arranged spec sheets just to figure out which components were compatible, and even then the prices were not worth it.

was looking for tires -the site looks great. Thanks!

Personally, I applaud Home Depot and Lowes for so meticulously recreating the utter dysfunction of their brick and mortar stores online

> Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce.

Sweetwater for music gear. They are the only online company I've ever dealt with that I consider better than Amazon.

I had a Home Depot order delivered recently, zero padding. It was just a cardboard box surrounding the product, and the product itself had little internal packaging (inc. Lithium Ion batteries). I'm surprised Home Depot hasn't started fires before.

Luckily the product I ordered worked fine, but I wasn't best pleased when I opened it. It was pretty obvious the manufacturer designed the product packaging for retail shelves only, and Home Depot just assumed it was shipping-grade protection.

My favorite from Target was eight Contigo travel mugs (bought for holiday gifts) that came in a very large box with no padding. Even though they could have clanked around and gotten very scratched, they were all OK. Sort of a miracle, but it didn't give me much confidence in Target.com.

And you can't state quantities on the Target.com site when you select an item. You have to go into the cart and change the quantity. That's something most sites do better.

Also, I understand it's a difficult time inventory-wise, but don't let me put stuff in my cart if you can't deliver it and won't let me order anything until I remove them. Give me a "save for later" feature ... like Amazon does.

One thing that’s weird about target is that they fulfill from stores. Usually when we get a shady packaging experience it’s shipping from a Target store from some unusual place.

Never had an issue with costco.com where I've made some of my big purchases.

Just this week I had an issue with Costco.com.

Ordered an item, their delivery estimate was 3-5 days. 7 days passed and the item hasn't shipped. No updated ETA or any information/communication on how long it might take.

Decided to cancel and order from an alternative vendor (who would communicate better, frankly). Was unable to even cancel it online (cancel button was missing, in contradiction to their help docs).

Tried to use Online Chat to cancel, which was seemingly offline/broken for multiple days. Finally called their customer service number, and it was cancelled within the hour (which credit where credit is due was one of the best telephone customer service experiences I've had).

Took all of 10 days to NOT receive a 3-5 day item from Costco.com, the replacement item ordered elsewhere arrived in 48 hours. Still don't know how long the Costco.com item would have taken because they never communicated that.

From experience internally (not at Costco, but other t20 retail), here's what happened, from most to least likely.

1. Your order type fell into an edge cast that an incomplete batch system -> system transfer job choked on. Naturally, it silently failed.

2. Inventory count mismatch.

3. Incomplete transportation handshake.

Logistics looks simple from a customer perspective: (1) order, (2) ship, (3) receive. From a vendor perspective it's (1+) bulk source, (2+) distribute, (3) maintain consistent inventory counts, (4) receive order, (5) source order items from stock most efficiently, (6) orchestrate multi-sourced items, (7+) provision & batch transportation, receiving and reshipping at multiple legs, (8+) fulfill last mile.

All while stitching together 30+ year old systems for each of those. And the +'d items are all semi-outside of the company's control. (Ever wonder why there are so many transportation-abstraction companies?)

Which is to say, no excuse for bad service. But it's a bear of a problem.

Incidentally, why most retail has excellent customer support phone centers (usually onshore): they know their systems break a non-zero amount of time, and want the best touch when you need to have things fixed.

This is a key point. Especially for prime items, but largely to other items they sell that are not fulfilled by them. It just feels like there is more responsibility through the amazon platform than other websites.

I ordered a case of water through Amazon through a reseller. The shipment literally got lost. Amazon dispute, 20 minutes later, refund is done.

I am waiting for a resolution through Paypal from another website - off amazon - since Friday for toilet paper that will definitely not be sent. After looking at policies, etc.. they generally don't do refunds.

Though, I did have luck on one other site.

Sure, but they handle it well.

I placed an order for a pair of 35lb dumbbells, and only one came, and the cardboard box around it was falling apart.

I called customer support, probably for the first time in my life, to ask wtf happened. And they explained the logistics issue (the dumbbells were shipped separately for some reason), and ended up crediting me half the cost of the dumbbells, even though the first wasn't really damaged.

Also their dumbbells were better and cheaper than Amazon's, so there's that too.

> (the dumbbells were shipped separately for some reason)

USPS limits packages to 70 LBs. There's probably some special option to get around this, but for the "normal" shipping, that's the limit.

If there is, it will cost 5x as much. They really don’t like special handling.

I imagine this is one of those things where everyone has different experiences. Or maybe it depends on location.

We recently moved into a new house (from an apartment) and needed lots of little things renters never worry about. I have ordered quite a bit of stuff from Home Depot, from a washer & dryer to a lawn mower to random small tools and paint. Never had any issue whatsoever.

To be fair, the in-person shopping experience at Home Depot is exactly the same. They're staying true to their ethos. ;)

Even BestBuy has problems. I have an order waiting to ship I want to cancel/return (unopened) but they won't let me. Guess they'll have to go through the full return process rather than just let me cancel.

Meanwhile, Amazon can cancel items even after they ship most of the time.

I've been pretty happy with newegg, and my recent electronics purchases have been split between it, Amazon, and direct from manufacturer (preferring direct unless there is a significant price difference, due to counterfeit-wariness).

Lowe's shopping site is an abomination, a tome of anti-patterns to be researched in design classes on what not to implement in e-commerce. It is a shame, because I really would like to purchase more from non-Amazon sources.

Zoro. Which is a division of Grainger, iirc.

Their website isn't the best for finding things, but I've never had any issues with an order from them, ever. And I've bought a lot of stuff.

Target is okay although I often get cosmetically damaged packaging.

Try mcmaster-carr. They beat the stuffing out of home depot, lowe's and amazon all when it comes to hardware.

Holy crap, this is awesome. I could find the EXACT pipe fitting I needed. How did I not know about this?

I’ve had good luck ordering lumber and landscaping supplies from Home Depot. No problems in half a dozen orders.

Another good one if you're in the midwest is Menards. They regularly have an 11% rebate which, for me, adds up quite a bit.

Pro tip for if you can physically go to one of their stores: If you make a purchase and they run their 11% rebate the next week, ask at the front desk for the pre-rebate adjustment, which lets you get it for your previous purchase.

Target is pretty great, I replaced Amazon with Target for most things.

I'm really surprised to hear so many horrible experiences with Home Depot ordering online. Over the past 2-3 months I have placed multiple orders for things that are shipped to my house, and that has gone off without a hitch.

I've also placed an order for "express delivery" which seems to be a HD delivery driver coming from either a store or a local warehouse. I placed an order for a bunch of screws, insulating foam, joist hangers, etc. My ordered was placed around 1pm and I had the items on my porch by about 6pm the same day.

I also ordered a bunch of lumber, sheets or rigid insulation, etc. that needed to be delivered by truck. The driver arrived on time, used his all-terrain forklift to navigate around a bunch of parked cars (I live in a fairly dense residential neighborhood), and place the whole load right where I wanted it on my front lawn. Couldn't be happier with the whole process.

Just thought it was worth sharing some positive experiences, as a counter point to the negative ones here.

I have also placed maybe a dozen Home Depot orders over the years with no issue. Including a fridge that was delivered last month. I also like their app.

Apparently I’m an outlier.

Let's face it Home Depot is garbage. From my experience they fail completely when at the store (employees running away from you, ignoring you, trying to avoid being asked for help, etc). The store, the way it's setup, tries to agressively cut corners. (The default for checking out is self checkout)

I went to menards and I found the experience really rewarding. It's great. They're not a great company ecologically, labor rights, etc. However, 95% of the time I have a good experience when asking for help and with the prices.

FWIW I just ordered a bunch of shit from home depot, it arrived faster than amazon could deliver it and everything I was looking for was in stock. I've also never had any major complaints in person with unhelpful staff—just the opposite. My only gripe with them is the self checkout you mentioned (why am I doing the store's work for them?), which certainly is not going to improve if Amazon moves into the retail space.

I have no clue where this impression of competence on Amazon's behalf is coming from—I must simply have radically different luck with the service they provide.

Perhaps it's different with a store like Home Depot where products are much bigger and perhaps harder to scan, but do people actually dislike self checkouts?

"Doing the work for the store" seems like such a non-argument to me. I would much prefer to scan things myself as I feel I can often do it faster, and I don't have to wait in a line if the store only has two cashiers staffed at a certain time.

You pump your own gas. Why is checking yourself out so much more controversial?

One possible reason is that eliminates a whole category of unskilled labor? (full disclosure, writing this from Oregon, where we can't pump our own gas to preserve another category of unskilled labor jobs - except right now, thanks COVID-19?) I personally would probably prefer to have a human checker for that reason, I don't notice much improvement in speed or ease of checking out when I do it myself, there's just a line for the self-checkouts instead...

> writing this from Oregon, where we can't pump our own gas

I thought that got changed a couple of years ago?

Only in rural counties with a total population of less than 40,000 people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/0...

Not that I know of. And NJ is still full serve only as well.

https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2019/03/want-to-pump-yo...

This must have been what I was thinking of - I guess it didn't pass. I live in Washington but regularly journey down for Trail Blazers games.

Personally, I don’t mind driving through NJ for just this reason, traffic aside.

The "pro desk," garden center, and the returns desk are all places where I am able to have someone check me out. As you said, I don't work for Home Depot. However if you're getting penny clearance items the self checkout is the place to visit.

Home Depot was pretty good until 2 things.

They used to hire people with actual experience in the building trades as well as regular store clerk types. The store clerks launched a lawsuit saying they were being discriminated against, and won. This was basically the end of being able to attract talent from the building trades as the settlement required clerks to have the same opportunities as skilled people.

The other thing was the hiring of the guy who used to run Burger King, who put the final nail in the coffin.

They used to be good, but now it's worse than useless. The staff has become less knowledgeable over time and the quality of the products sold have gone way downhill.

I usually now seek out specialty places that deal with just one part of the problems Home Depot and Lowes addresses like looking for a plumbing supply place that actual professional plumbers would use.

There should always be a register open, it's company policy for a cashier to be at a register at all times (at least with the most recent setup). Some people like self, others hate it. In the end, though, it's about which cashiers are on duty, and I'm sure you're aware quality can vary widely.

Menards has great rebates too. I tend to think of them as tax-free income.

I ordered some things from Home Depot the other day as well. They did not fulfill half the order, instead marking it as delivered. Attempting to resolve this issue, they refunded only 1/3rd of the missing items and then required me to go to a physical store to resolve the issue because their system literally could not fix the problem without them offering a physical cash refund.

This is likely to do with the store which fulfilled the order; I've found Home Depots to be very hit or miss in their service quality and the location which fulfilled this order has been consistently bad in-person.

Don't even get me started on how Home Depot uses location settings and keeps changing preferred stores when ordering. It's a nightmare.

DO NOT order from Home Depot online. I made that mistake once and found out that they reuse SKUs for different product models. They will pull the wrong product off the shelf because the SKU is all they go off of. Support refuses to do anything about items delivered from a local store. The store employee won't be able to readily exchange the item.

> Support refuses to do anything about items delivered from a local store.

Partially true. Support may actually contact the store and negotiate a refund for you. Allegedly I'll be refunded for the from-store delivery fee for my first order that had some of the items cancelled, and I didn't talk to the store directly.

My favorite is how home depot lists stuff in stock on the search results page, but then when you click the individual item it's out of stock.

It's a store. Why the fuck would a store ever show me an item -- at least by default -- that it isn't willing to sell me? Like who exactly wants that "feature"? It makes attempting to buy something from home depot's site an infuriating experience.

Even better, you can reserve items to pickup at Home Depot online which are not actually in stock. Website quantities are not tied to point of sale, and are instead manually enteted by staff when they have the opportunity/bandwidth.

(Or at least that was the explanation given by Home Depot's customer support.)

I feel like I'm using a different homedepot.com than everyone else on this thread. I'm not aware of an option to reserve things for pickup at the store, only to purchase them and pickup at the store. Every time I have done this they send an email when the order is ready to be picked up, and then I go there and pick up all the items. Not saying you didn't have the experience you did, just wondering if they actually do things differently in different parts of the country.

> I'm not aware of an option to reserve things for pickup at the store, only to purchase them and pickup at the store.

Those two things you just said are the same thing.

I don't think they are. When the parent commenter said reserved for pickup, I assumed they meant some way to say "hold these at the counter for me to come purchase". What I am saying is that in my experience, you are making a purchase, someone at the store is pulling the items from the shelf and setting them in a special area, then you get an email/text that the order is ready, meaning that everything is ready to go, they had all the items, and no other customer will be able to purchase the items that you ordered.

"hold these for me until I get there" is exactly the same as "don't let someone else buy them before I get there". Whether you pay before you get there or after doesn't change the fact that the item is being held for you so that no other customer will be able to purchase the items that you ordered.

We can break down your two statements and put them piecemeal side by side:

I assumed they meant... "hold these..."

What I am saying is... "pulling the items from the shelf..."

I assumed they meant... "at the counter..."

What I am saying is... "in a special area..."

You're completely correct. What I was trying to communicate, and what I should have emphasized, is that it's not just a send and forget kind of process. After the items have been set aside you get an email/text to confirm that things are ready to pickup and in my experience everything that I've ordered is there when I go to pick it up. So I'm saying that the things that were listed as in stock on the website are actually in stock at the store, and I get a confirmation once everything has been "secured" for me.

The first part sounds like a pretty terrible UI bug - it should be showing as out of stock everywhere :thinking: maybe the search results don't cross-check your selected store location but the detail page for an item does. (not excusing it just thinking where the issue could be)

A couple of reasons to show items they can't sell you right now in the search results...

1. The best reason I can think of is if you click into it and it isn't available then they could show "similar" items and cross-sell you on those - and maybe actually help you find a good alternative.

2. If you are searching for a specific item then the result should show you that item regardless of availability or you'd just keep looking for it and be confused about it never showing up in their results.

3. Maybe SEO? More listings - even out of stock listings -> more SEO juice

One of the items I tried ordering that was cancelled showed 34 in stock at that store while I was on the phone with them (immediately after the delivery person left) trying to find out why they cancelled my items and they were saying the items were probably out of stock in that store.

And if you have three stores within a couple of miles of you that all claim to have a bunch of stock of an item but you order from one that suddenly (allegedly) runs out, you get to go all the way back down the hill because they don't migrate stock between stores.

This is one of the reasons I don't buy things from Home Depot if I can help it. I've gone to multiple stores thinking something was in stock to only find they were all out of stock. On top of that, the staff there are almost helpless when it comes to finding things that aren't on the shelf itself. If it's up top, be prepared to waste an hour trying to get someone to fetch the item. (If it's there!)

Their poor system can work in your favor though. Went to go pick up my order after it being cancelled at multiple places. Turns out, at this one, they only had 2 of the 4 items at pickup. I tell them it says there are more in stock, they confirm. We go hunting for the remaining 2. Takes 30 minutes for them to fetch the remaining two from the top with my help (without my help, they would have never found it!). We go back to the register, they punch in that they're giving me 2 more. I go home with all 4 of my items. I was never charged for the full order. Only the initial 2.

I mean technically that is stealing but I guess its pretty low on the scale of "bad stuff".

Is it? They rung me up with it - it's up to them to decide what to charge me. I'd put as "bank error in my favor." I only noticed later when I was making sure they didn't overcharge me when looking at my bank account. (They had to charge and refund about 3x)

It's still stealing, the correct move would be to go back and pay the correct amount as you likely would have done if they overcharged you.

That said, I doubt you could legally be held responsible and I see no problems with what you did morally either. If you noticed at the time I'd find it morally questionable, but you can't fix every mistake.

Stealing requires intent, generally.

Not just that, but like, the parent commenter actually got his items rung up in the store. So the parent wouldnt have even noticed they didn’t get charged for those items unless they were constantly checking their bank account for actual dollar amounts charged for every purchase. I find it difficult to believe that anyone would be able to claim that the parent commenter is at fault here.

I said they weren't at fault legally or morally. That doesn't mean it wasn't stolen.

I mean, imagine this.

I walk up to a cashier, and he by accident drops $10 in my shopping cart (without me noticing). Then he proceeds to inconspicuously take those $10, look at it, and silently put it back in the bag (again, without me noticing). I discover those $10 only when I get home. I had no idea it was even there, and the store employee definitely looked through every single item in my bag and saw those $10, but just decided to put it back there. Did I steal those $10?

I struggle to even call it something like "theft by accident", which would be if the cashier forgets to scan an item because they didn't notice it. In my hypothetical scenario, the cashier noticed and picked up the item.

>Did I steal those $10?

Yes. You have acquired it without the intentional consent of the owner, who presumably thought it was your $10. I don't think it's a crime nor would I find you personally responsible.

That’s a weird definition of theft. By this definition if I pick up a quarter off the sidewalk I’m stealing too.

If you picked up a hundred dollar bill in the same situation and didn't have any intention of returning it, would you consider that stealing?

My definition of theft doesn't presume it was legally or morally wrong, so many innocent actions would still be theft.

Return it to who?

If you saw someone drop it, sure. If you know the owner of the hundred dollar bill, sure. But otherwise?

I think you just have an odd definition of theft.

From Merriam Webster:

1. a : the act of stealing

specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it

1. b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property

2 : a stolen base in baseball

3 obsolete : something stolen

>If you saw someone drop it, sure. If you know the owner of the hundred dollar bill, sure. But otherwise?

Presumably the owner would retrace their steps and try to find what was lost. Most people would do this for a hundred dollars, but you can also imagine a child doing it for a quarter. Is it theft if you say you haven't seen it? How about if you never run into the person but intended to say you haven't seen it?

At what point it becomes "theft" is tenuous at best. I'd rather call many things "theft" and withhold judgment until I learn the details as it limits instantaneous judgments upon hearing of a thief.

As for your definition, at what point something becomes unlawful is never clear, and nobody's actual definitions for concepts ever mirror a dictionary definition.

I think you're just taking a word that already has a definition and redefining it. Or at least greatly stretching the definition.

And assuming theft unless otherwise proven? That's weird to me too, especially combined with your follow up of limiting instantaneous judgement. How on earth is assuming someone committed theft limiting judgement?

>think you're just taking a word that already has a definition and redefining it.

Everybody does that all of the time, your definition for words are based on your own experiences.

>And assuming theft unless otherwise proven?

No, assuming theft. More things are called theft.

>How on earth is assuming someone committed theft limiting judgement?

You still think that a thief is a bad person. I assume basically everyone has committed theft, so withhold judgment until I have more information.

There are common definitions of what words mean. If the meaning of words become arbitrary then we lose the ability to communicate effectively.

An action was taken, e.g. picking up a quarter off the side walk. There is no need to put another label on it randomly, just call it what it is, picking up a quarter. By using a word that already has a commonly accepted meaning, and a negative one at that, and associate it with an innocent action you're already labeling it in a negative way for everyone else. Everyone (or at least majority of other people) thinks a thief is a bad person. If only you don't think so and label someone else doing nothing bad a thief, then you're labeling someone a bad person.

It's like me calling you a rapist. But I don't mean rapist in the typical way, I just mean anyone that has sex. So to me a rapist is not a bad person and I'll withhold judgement until I have more information. So I can just go around calling you a rapist right?

>There are common definitions of what words mean.

What are they? People assume their definition is common, but everything is much less clear than that. This causes frequent disagreements, and it's best to get more information.

>There is no need to put another label on it randomly, just call it what it is, picking up a quarter.

There is no need for me to label the action at all unless I'm in a position to explain what I mean. My position on the action is primarily private. Changing the definition is more useful in the other direction, when you call someone a thief I don't assume I have any idea what they did or what kind of person that makes them.

>Everyone (or at least majority of other people) thinks a thief is a bad person.

Using such labels to judge an entire persons worth is ridiculous in a number of ways. There are too many ways that both of us would consider innocent that can get you labeled a thief. I was almost booked for stealing $40 of gas after realizing I lost my wallet after filling the tank. Am I a bad person because of that?

>So I can just go around calling you a rapist right?

This started as me labeling an action as theft. If I walked around blindly calling people thieves I would expect the misunderstanding to cause problems for me.

> This started as me labeling an action as theft.

That's what I mean with the rapist example too. If you have sex with someone, do I have the right to call you a rapist first and withhold judgement until I have more information? If for me a rapist isn't necessarily a bad act.

No, you are jumping straight into calling someone a rapist. If I described perfectly consensual sex and you replied "it's rape" with no explanation, you should also expect repercussions for the misunderstanding.

Labeling an act primarily privately and publicly labeling a person are vastly different.

This might answer your question though. If you pointed at someone and said "this person is a rapist," I would withhold judgment until learning more details. A label is not enough to evaluate someone's life. And I try to limit who i casually toss such labels onto, preferring to give some detail into their act.

Generally, but it can happen by accident. Have you never accidentally stolen a borrowed pen?

"bank error in your favor" is not a real thing and a bank will definitely hold you accountable for that. But I honestly read your description as HD just giving you the extras as a gift for your hassle.

This has long been an issue I've had when trying to use online shopping/curbside pickup for grocery stores, and this comes even before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and pushed more of us fortunate to live in cities where online grocery buying is a thing to....well start buying groceries online.

Found myself just as baffled/apoplectic as you are: why would this be on your online storefront if you don't have the inventory for me to actually buy?

Even Amazon Prime delivery via Whole Foods has this problem, to bring it back around to the thread topic.

Interestingly it's something that small e-commerce stores are much better about, it would seem (though I don't really have any data backing that up)

Last year I tried setting up a subscription for some pet food from a mid-sized pet store chain.

The first order went through fine.

3.5 weeks later I get an email saying my next order is about to be processed, now is the last chance for cancellations, etc. I ignore it, as I want the order to be processed.

A few days later I get an email saying they're out of stock and they'll retry again later. I get these emails every day for 2 weeks, and then my order is automatically cancelled.

This happens for 2 or 3 months before I get fed up and cancel the subscription.

If I put in an order effectively a month in advance you'd think they could make sure they had enough stock for that upcoming order.

(And it wasn't a complicated order, just multiple boxes of a single SKU.)

>> why would this be on your online storefront if you don't have the inventory for me to actually buy?

Twofold:

1) They're betting that you'll still buy something once you're surrounded by merchandise. 2) This allows them to play games with shrink, imventory, and insurance.

They're betting that you'll still buy something once you're surrounded by merchandise.

Hrm. Good point, that’s exactly what’s ended up happening. Just never actively considered it

Personally, I think this is due to "Microservices". You have a separate "search" microservice whose data is out of date or misaligned with the "product listing" microservice. Same goes with Amazon and international delivery on some level. It's gotten better over the years, but there is still such a mismatch such that you can't "filter" only "international" delivery items.

Depending on what you want you will probably have better luck calling (not online, a voice call) your local lumber yard. They deal with contractors all the time who call their orders in for delivery so this is business as usual. They wouldn't know how to help you if you walked in the door.

Make sure you setup an account with a salesman. They work on commission, but if you know what you want they know exactly how to enter your order so your small order is easy to handle. (contractors often give them a blueprint and tell them to deliver materials which is work for them although it is more money)

Same story happened to me last Friday. I put in an order on their website, met their minimum delivery order amount, and yet when I got the confirmation email an hour later, I found out 3/4 of my items were being shipped to my nearest (35min, 60km) home depot.

I called customer service and was told it was impossible to change the order so all get delivered, and that it was impossible to cancel the order. My only recourse is to go to their wharehouse, pick it up, then ship it back.

I don't love amazon, but they don't pull this crap on me.

I'm pretty sure if you call the credit card company and do a chargeback they'll side with you on this.

I’ve had that happen too but I intentionally did it to get a discounted battery for my riobi drill. I got the batch discount for multiple items had the stuff I didn’t want sent to store and just had to show up to return it

I live in Australia, and there is Amazon but they don't have that much stuff compared to UK/US. So I order from other places, and it is super rare to have any kind of ordering or delivery problem. Things just arrive! In 2020 they are all using some order processing and tracking tech and it seems to go smoothly.

Also same experience in the UK with both Amazon and non-Amazon going back to the year 1998 when I was ordering motherboards online. Ordering stuff online is never a problem where I would scream "agh! only Amazon can do this!".

The only problems I have had is in the mid-late 2000's with second hand stuff from ahats on ebay, and paypal siding with the non-quickthrower2 person in most cases, I guess I got bad luck there.

I ordered a car port tent thing, showed as in stock, shipping in a few days. 8 weeks later never arrived, no notifications, only an order confirmation that said shipping in a few days. I called Home Depot and they said they don't have them in stock, they refunded me and gave me a $200 credit so I was happy. Couldn't believe how broke the ordering process was though.

It's because those notifications, at least from the store, are manual, associates have to manage each order in a horrendously ugly and complex system.

I never get why there is not a department in charge of checking orders that are obviously stuck before they become a support issue.

Because that costs money?

As does dealing with this as a customer service issue. I would argue that for most companies catching this internally costs far less than waiting to handle an annoyed customer.

It seems the kind of charge I would dispute with my credit card company.

I ordered from Home Depot. We were finishing a bathroom a couple weeks into November last year. We ordered the beginning of October with a delivery date in October. Good deal. Good thing I like to check "status" often as the main item we ordered had its date changed to the end of November for delivery. So I make the trip in to talk to them. I go find the exact same item in-store and then I have to show them where it is because their system has it in the wrong place. Not a good experience with them.

India doesn't even have any homedepot/McMaster Car equivalent.

There are some online shops which sell chemicals but they charge a lot for its delivery.

Meanwhile, you can't buy Welding rod, helmet or machines online.

This is the difference between delivery being your primary focus versus secondary focus.

I've ordered from other traditional retail places before, like Target and Walmart and Macy's, and I haven't had a problem. They care more about technology than most people think, even though their primary focus is in-store sales.

Home Depot just isn't as good at delivery as they are. Ikea is also pretty terrible. What they both seem to have in common is a coordination problem between their inventory systems and the third-party delivery services that actually get the stuff to the customer. Most of the time the stuff they sell is too big to send through the mail.

Over one hundred replies to this? How to get attention on hacker news, just gripe and whine about your interaction with a big corporation, I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com