It all started on Saturday afternoon when I was trying to buy a fairly rare DVD for a relative. After much hunting, I’d managed to track the DVD down to Zavvi.co.uk and that’s where I came across one of the most infuriating checkout procedures that I’ve encountered in recent times.
If you don’t know who Zavvi are, they were formed after a management buyout of Virgin Megastores so have plenty of experience in the industry and you’d expect their website to be up there with the other online retailers for usability.
To be fair to Zavvi, the front-end of the website is easy to use and whilst the code isn’t perfect, a quick glance at it did indicate that they’re attempting to use semantic markup, are using CSS and have moved away from using tables for layout which so many other shopping carts still use today.
I managed to find the product I wanted to purchase very easily, added it to my shopping cart, went to the checkout, signed up and entered a delivery address which was all very simple and easy to do. However, I then moved onto the payment details screen and spent more time on this page than I did on the rest of the site put together.
The above image shows the fields that need to be completed within the payment screen of the Zavvi website. It all looks very familiar if you’ve ever bought anything online and as usual took me about 30 seconds to copy the details from my bank card into the relevant fields.
After hitting submit and waiting a few seconds, I was a little surprised to find that I was shown the following error message.
Whilst a little surprised, it’s not unusual that a mistake can be made during the checkout process so I was quite happy to go back and recheck my details.
Unfortunately though, the only error on the entire page was the one in the image above (Attention, some fields have errors! Your card payment transaction failed).
I don’t know about you, but it would have been nice if there was some indication as to which fields had errors instead of forcing me to go through them all and check them individually.
But again, I did this and amazingly, I was still shown the same error message with no indication of anything specific that was wrong.
So, I went back through the field again and wondered whether maybe the long card number required the spaces after every four digits… no that wasn’t it.
Then I wondered whether it was maybe the start date? Most sites don’t require that for a Visa card so if I change that to N/A then maybe it will accept it… No that didn’t work but once again no indication as to what I’m actually doing wrong.
At this point, I’d almost given up and was searching other sites for the same item (no it wasn’t Ratatouille) but they were either out of stock or were far more expensive. So I stuck with Zavvi and tried again.
The field for start date was blank when I initially came to this page so I decided to change this back to blank instead of entering the date on my card or using N/A and I hit the submit button once again.
To my relief, this worked and my order was accepted.
But it still left me feeling a little bit annoyed at the time I’d spent completing this task which should be simple and left me wondering how many other people would simply go elsewhere when they couldn’t fathom out the payment page?
I’m by no means your average user, I’ve bought many things on line as well as designing and building forms just like this so if I have difficulty completing something so simple then it doesn’t fill me with much hope for less experienced users to have a less frustrating time with this page.
Suggestions
I’d start by removing the asterix from the “Start Date” field as this suggests that it’s mandatory for everyone to enter something when it clearly isn’t.
The N/A doesn’t seem to serve a purpose and would be served much better if it was removed and people could simply select a date if required of just leave it blank otherwise.
If an error occurs, display a message at the top by all means but then also display some form of error next to the field where the problem lies and explain how to fix it. There’s nothing more infuriating than trying to correct a form without actually knowing what the problem was. As far as I was aware, I could have been creating more problems by my attempts to correct the form and therefore without knowing what exactly the problem is, it’s very difficult to fix without a lot of persistence.
Summary
It probably took me 7 or 8 attempts to complete this form until I was finally successful. I’m sure this is far more times than any average user would stick around for and had it been in stock at HMV, Play.com or Amazon then Zavvi would have lost a customer not just for this item but probably for good.
Luckily for Zavvi, the item I was purchasing was quite rare so I persisted with the form (although I nearly rang my local Zavvi store to see if they had it in stock).
In this day and age it still amazes me how wrong some big companies get what should be such simple things so wrong. A little thought and usability testing should have uncovered problems like this but it’s surprising how often we see this kind of problem.
Sounds like security gone bad. What I found odd, based on the image, is Start Date is marked as a required field, but then it says “if applicable” in parenthesis. If applicable sure sounds like it’s optional. Asking for that, to me, is very strange — never seen it before actually.
Hi Mike, Thanks for commenting. That was exactly what my problem was as I do have a start date on my card but don’t usually have to enter it but as they’d provided an N/A option I presumed I could select it but it wasn’t to be.
The start date usually only applies to switch cards so it may have been better for them to explicitly spell this out instead of just letting people guess whether they need to provide the data for this field or not.
The error handling was the big one for me though as it wasn’t actually clear that the start date was the problem in the first place.
I recently had a similar experience where a website told me that the phone number I had entered was in the wrong format but it didn’t tell me what the RIGHT format was! I entered everything I could think of – country code in front, spaces in between, hyphens in between and it wouldn’t work. I finally entered the default (incorrect) phone number that was on the form initially and it went through. Very frustrating and they still don’t have the correct info!
I would have gone else where!! To me I would rather spend an extra few $ for a website working easy, stress is not worth saving a few $ for!
@Laura – I’ve come across similar problems with phone numbers as well as zip/postcodes where it’s telling me that it’s in the wrong format but hasn’t given me any hint as to what the right format is.
@Jermayn – I usually would but the particular item I was buying was £5 (about $10) from Zavvi whereas the next cheapest I could find it in stock was £20 (roughly $40) so it was quite a significant amount that I would have had to spend more which I couldn’t really justify.
Just as quick tip, I use the following site for hunting for games, dvds, books etc as it’s a really useful comparison site.
http://www.find-dvd.co.uk/
Update: I’ve had an email from the head of ecommerce operations of Zavvi, Melvin Simpson who was happy for me to post the contents of his email here.
It’s great that he’s actually taken the time to respond to my comments and has acknowledged that the current system isn’t quite working as it should.
Hopefully with the changes they’re planning on making, they should notice an improvement in conversion rates and less users dropping out on the payment page.
I’ve been experiencing problems with paying for a game all afternoon. When it eventually worked I found that I had inadvertantly ordered 4. No telephone number to sort it with the company.
Apalling
I’ve experienced the same thing, I am still trying to place my order now…Last month I just gave up but found even though it gave me the error message to my horror the money was still taken from my bank but on the site my order had not been placed, I rang them and they refunded me so now as im desperate for the game (Wii play + remote) and its the cheapest I’ve seen the same error message has occurred and I still can’t place an order the only field I don’t have to fill out is the issue number I have tried the N/A but this doesn’t work either im lost now because the phone number 0845 277 7447 I cant get to work either now.
I’ve been trying to place an order on the zavvi.co.uk site all day and have tried all the suggestions here with no success yet. Selecting NA or blank in the start date doesn’t work for me.
Really disappointing that a company like this can’t get the fundamentals right in web design and function. It’s not rocket science to write an online store, it’s been done to death and with great success.
I’m going to try going into my local Zavvi store and getting them to give me the online prices in there as their site is broken.
Wish me luck.
Yeah Ive tried to order today off the website and all I keep getting is error. I tried to clear my basket and then add the item again but it now wont allow me to add anything to my basket.
A total balls up by Zavvi
Hell Yeah. Just tried again and it seems to be working ok now.
Thank god I found this page! I ordered Planet Earth HDDVD last night and I had the same problem, only the screen didn’t go back to an error message, it just timed out and gave me a page cannot be displayed type spiel. Tried going back and restarting the process and it worked fine. However, when I got the order receipt it said they were sending it to my old address where I no longer live, when I had spent ages putting my new one in!! So I emailed instantly to cancel my order as there was no way they could despatch it that fast or process it even…no response….this evening I log in to find they’ve despatched it to my old address. What a moronic system they seem to be running. I won’t stop until I get my money back and this site will be key to my argument! Thanks again!
I tried to order Planet Earth HDDVD three times too and no joy! Checked my Bank balance and yes you’ve guessed! My available balance was showing £59.97 less than i expected! 3x £19.99. Phoned my bank and they say three payments pending for zavvi and they can’t stop it! Can’t phone Zavvi! emailed them and waiting! Really pissed off!
Seven months on and it seems they still haven’t fixed this problem. A very disappointing experience indeed.
i have had the exact same problem. i tried to place an order and kept having the error message so i gave u after 4 attempts. but the cheeky gits have took 4 lots of payments out my bank!
Still the same here, ZAVVI are diabolical, have complained to trading standards many times about them. Their service and site is so bad it almost seems criminal. Imagine the ammount of people that have clicked this many times and not checked their card statment?
I think this has rather conviently been left on their site to collect extra cash from people who dont check their balances. Im furious with these thieves
I have been trying for the last 6 weeks to buy some items from zavvi. they keep blaming Mastercard 3D secure payments for the issue yet it is their site which gives the familiar ‘Attention, some fields have errors! A problem occured while processing your order’
For petes sake zavvi sort this out!
I’ve just had the same thing, googled it to see if anyone else did and found this site. Tried about 8 times with one card, and about 4 with another. Thought it may be my address as my flat is a new build, so tried my parents address. (A problem I also had with Game – they rejected my order after almost 2 weeks as my postcode is new and they couldn’t recognise it. Yet they failed to e-mail me – I had to look it up on the order tracking facility – good job I’m xmas shopping early!) Still no luck on Zavvi with the change of address. Read all your comments here, tried everything, still no luck. Can’t find a phone number to ring – it’s appauling! But just left it 10 minutes, then tried again and it seems to have worked. I had to put in my password for my banking though, so I’m guessing there’s something wrong with that, that’s whats causing it?
After a week of senseless replies of zavvi “support”, they claimed this page would referr to “issues some time ago which have been rectified”, which is obviously wrong considering the dates of the latest comments.
Anyhow, they also “offered” to call their “limited phone service” at 0845 371 4337 to “talk me through placing my order”.
I’m not from the UK, so I won’t call – so if any of you people with this issue want, feel free to call their “support”.
May be they will finally understand that it is their own fault and fix the issue, although I seriously doubt that.
So long zavvi …
Well done, your post made Zavvi go bust.