[kevin_thibedeau]

I made the mistake of online ordering from Home Depot and they "conveniently" shipped from a local store. Only problem is that they apparently have a habit of reusing SKUs and sent me an older model that I didn't order.

Given a chance, brick and mortars will fuck everything up. Guaranteed.

[maccard]

>Given a chance, brick and mortars will fuck everything up. Guaranteed.

Let's not pretend Amazon are innocent of fuck ups like this. I'm a semi regular shopper with Amazon (uk) and in the last 12 months I've had: - used products sold as new - products sent by Amazon's own courier service for "next day delivery" show up after 3 days - flat out wrong items sent - previews for books sent in place of actual books - received knock off cables when ordering manufacturer cables.

That's not to consider the mess of trying to order goods from Amazon and figuring out when they'll arrive. Searching for "prime" or sold by Amazon doesn't actually guarantee next day delivery on rh item, nor does it guarantee the item will be correct.

Their only saving grace is that every time I have a problem, I can resolve it with live chat, they send a replacement and a courier picks up the old item from my office (if they even bother asking for it back)

[kevin_thibedeau]

Fixing Amazon mistakes is relatively painless.

With Home Depot their phone support was 100% useless and I had to physically go to the store the item shipped from. I made sure the new product was on the shelf and tried to do a simple exchange. Unfortunately the duplicate SKU was a problem and the price had increased since I paid for the order so the drone wanted me to pay the difference. That wasn't going to happen so my time had to be further wasted arguing with them over their mistake.

[maccard]

Yeah that's awful, and like I said, Amazon's policy of "refund and we'll pick it up" if there's a problem has kept me shopping there.

My latest issue was a clearly used item being sold as new, and it was damaged. The price had increased since I ordered it, and with one live chat they couriered me a replacement, and picked up the old one, at no cost to me.

[oldjokes]

I tried to order a few boxes of hardwood flooring from Home Depot one time and despite being in stock at the store 20 miles away from me they somehow managed to outsource delivery to some local company that delayed delivery repeatedly because of "weather" for four months. This local company never picked up the phone or returned emails.

I had to do a chargeback as Home Depot refused to refund me, they seemed confused as to where the shipment was. I don't think HD or any company run in the HD mold will ever be competitive if these are the outcomes.

[Fins]

I've had pretty much the same experience with Amazon (for a "sold and fulfilled by Amazon") item. Except that Amazon kept lying to me about pretty much everything, from whether they've even shipped an item to whether I could get a refund of Prime membership to a lot of other things.

They aren't any better, and their customer "service" is pretty much limited to "throw the customer another month of Prime (it's worthless anyway) and hope they go away".

[godzillabrennus]

I learned recently that only about 5% of Walmart revenue is from e-commerce.

The industry average for a brick and mortar is just about 10%.

They don’t do much online revenue because they don’t invest in growing it. They don’t invest in growing it because it’s too small a portion of their business to warrant investment.

Online first companies are eating brick and mortar alive because of this.