A few Saturdays ago, I received an email from a retailer telling me that that was the last day to use the promo code they had for 15% off. Since they were selling one of the items that I had specially budgeted for, I eagerly headed to their website.
I put that item in my cart, browsed a bit, and found another item to add to my cart. I clicked to check out, put in the promo code, and received a message that the promotion had expired.
Fearing I'd remembered the code wrong, I double checked the email and retyped the code in. I received the same message. I tried all capital letters. I tried changing the SUMMER15 code to SUMMER17, thinking that maybe there'd been a typo. Nothing worked.
I went to the contact page for customer service and sent them an email. I picked the option for problems with the shopping cart. That seemed accurate and I was sure that a customer who was trying to spend money in their store was having a problem doing would receive a very quick reply to their query. I was wrong.
After a few hours of waiting, I tried to put the code in again. My theory was that others must have had issues with it too and that certainly the site would have had it fixed by then.
Nope. Still didn't work.
It boggles my mind that an online retailer wouldn't be monitoring their customer service emails under topics that impact sales. I could see leaving the regular queries for the weekdays, but if someone is trying to spend money and can't, shouldn't they address that immediately? I don't get it. I also didn't get my item that I wanted to buy. Retailer snoozes, retailer loses.
