Are Our Online Computer Retails Apathetic to the Customer Experience?

[rant] Online vendors have come a long way from a convenience to shear annoyance and dread. What used to be efficient and logical approaches to product showcase and categorical filtering has become a gumbo of useless entries that some ill-equipped AI snippet, sold as a package deal with the site programmer, purchased by some depressed office manager in the name of progress and empty sense of excitement, wherein the AI deemed it necessary for the common customer to wade through muck simply to wear them down to the point that the customer feels obligated to buy just Anything that comes close to resembling what they initially were searching for. [/rant]
I remember a time when online shopping was a new and revolutionary concept. It was a time of fear and hope. Questions like "Will my credit information get hijacked, or will it actually work?" were always in mind if I contemplated a transaction - though I didn't make many in those days. I discovered the World Wide Web with everyone else, fumbling through the mysterious buttons and links to garner something that might be more useful than a novelty. In particular I discovered a site where I can buy parts for my wonderful machines, whereas no other store in my area carried anything remotely like it! This online vendor seemed to accommodate any possible need, organizing the product line into logical categories. These categories were even customizable on some vender sites, and eventually other vendors competed for providing the features that customers can “customize” their searches. Much good came from this, as well as laziness and eventual apathy. These early vendors would offer smart search engines that filtered out anything unrelated. I wonder if things began to go bad starting with the search engine.
You see in the old days of high technology, when one searched by using a string, then only what was in that particular string would return within the results. In contrast by using that same search methodology, nowadays, returns a jumble of the used keywords in several different arrangements with several different spellings and permutations, when all one wanted was an exact match to the original string. In the name of progress, the quality of function is in regress.
To clarify my example: In the year 2000, if I wanted to search for a specific owl, I may have searched “spotted owl.” The result would have only been a number of articles that included an exact match to “spotted owl.” If a website had (sic) “spoted owl” instead, it would not have even shown up in the results.
This property of a search engine of any kind is paramount to me, and was honored by early online vendors. A major gripe, then, is when I search for a “Phenom iiX4 945,” why do they (vendor sites’ search engines) insist on showing me entries for a “Phenom iiX4 955”?!? Failing to resist the urge to drip into sarcasm, I find that, even better, a trend of vendors returning results for products they don’t even stock!! What a cheap way to cheat a web search! That’s the equivalent to a hardware store telling a catalogue that they sell a potentially popular item (not that the 955 or 945 is inherently popular now) just to attract people to the property, then lo and beholden the product is always ‘sold out’ or not carried in stock. I’m sure there must be laws on the book in most polities against this form of false advertisement. Howbeit, the impersonal nature of shopping online removes the part of human interaction that allows one to look another in the eye to kick in another’s guilt. >sigh< It’s already late at night.
I am immensely curious how others have experienced the machine of impersonalized selling and buying in the customer/vendor relation… don’t use ebay – that’s a marketplace. I’m curious about shops that have words like ‘micro,’ ‘egg,’ ‘tiger,’ ‘zip,’ and/or ‘clock,’ in the company’s name.
Is it just my experience? Is it everyone that shudders at the prospect of sifting through the mulch to find that one item that you KNOW exists and the company sells, and even invoking it by the right words this item refuses to reveal itself as an option to be purchased. Or better, the item is replaced by something completely unrelated?!? For instance, I recently searched for a firewire 800 expresscard device using keywords “ieee1392b,” “firewire800,” and “expresscard”; the store gave me every item that had firewire400 as a motherboard, and every expresscard that translated USB1-3, but nothing with the firewire 800 were in the results. However, when I searched by using an exact model name, it found it and several other firewire 800 devices (mostly pci and pcie interfaces). This tells me that this company (that shares part of its name with Shaolin history) doesn’t care enough about the customer experience to sort it’s databases. Another company showed tens of tens of products that have features incorporating firewire 800, but they mustn’t have eaten their eggs that morning, as all but four of the results were discontinued, literally or effectually. Such craziness!! The paradigm is a store that specializes in selling and showcasing computer stuff, lacking the software maintenance to provide a functional and aesthetic presentation of product. It seems to me that companies only have the ever-intrusive survey “opt-in” boxes following you through the entirety of the viewable site so-as to lay claim that they really Do care (the sarcasm continues to drippeth).
Another big irritation is that while these companies sell a Lot of product, they are so ‘volume-of-sales’ oriented that aren’t intimately familiar with (at least) the important specifications of these products, notwithstanding the basic core fiber of products that most people need to know certain specs, like MoBo, RAM, etc.. What I mean here is that when selling specialty product, you need to know WHY the market prefers one model over the other, apart from the difference of price point. Going back to the firewire 800 example, though it’s important to know the interface type and port count, it’s equally important to know what brand or make the controller chipset is “under the hood.” Why would something like that be important? Quite simply, an entire market of hardware requires a particular chipset manufacturer’s standards in order to operate, period. In particular every firewire audio interface that I’m aware of will crash, BSOD, drop it’s I/O stream, and make hundreds of musicians scratch their non-computer-savvy heads thinking that their perfectly good, brand new equipment purchase is (in effect) DOA, when the real VIAble culprit is a cheap firewire controller, produced by cheap firewire controller manufacturers, on the host computer which only barely reaches IEEE specifications, if at all. You would think that a vendor of computer parts would be aware enough to provide basic information like that. Years ago once the shop became aware that a spec was important to even one customer, product descriptions shortly reflected that ‘important’ information; The customer was intrinsically valued in higher esteem.
>sigh< Are those days long gone? As Businesses become more and more impersonal, do we the customers or the consumers (intentional anthropological polarization – indication of the mindset of the customer or consumer as a role) suffer the redefinition of what it is to be a valued customer? Or can we, as individuals who choose where to stock our money into our choice of purchases, shape the businesses we exchange with? I don’t know that I can (or should) provide a definitive answer to that, as history is simply the observed result of entropy.
The poll..
I included the poll to measure cultural apathy; on where others stand with this “question” of mine. Each response is one that I distinctly remember having at one point or another when participating in the realm of online shopping. Cast a vote or not, just say no to incompetence in all forms!!