[Leica] Bad experience with B&H *website*

["Satish Kumar" <satish_kumar@hotmail.com>]

Folks,

I have had terrible luck with the B&H website today, wasting about 3 hours 
of my time total (mind you, I am talking only about the
website, I have had no real experience with B&H itself).  I have heard 
really good things about them here and elsewhere (which is
why I went there in the first place), and I want to know if anyone else have 
had similar problems.

First time, I spent about an hour and half looking through the products 
placing about 20 items on my cart (film, lens, processing
mailers, etc.) and then suddenly, I got an error saying that somehow it was 
unable to access my shopping cart.  Going back, forward
trying to get a cache of my shopping cart didn't work, in fact, it didn't 
even allow me to get back to the main page unless I opened a
completely new browser window (no "open link in new window" tricks), 
amazing!  I called them, and after talking to three people, I
got to a guy who said, well, I got to register to prevent such things from 
happening, so OK, I registered.  It seemed to work fine after
I registered -- when I had to step out for sometime, it said that my session 
had expired, but when I logged in again, the items were all
there fine!  So, I spent another hour getting the items I already had and 
some new items.  And I had to step out again, and when I
came back in it asked me to log in, and boom the shopping cart is empty, and 
all the items are gone!

Based on my experience, here is my recommendation:
1.  As far as possible, place an order by phone instead of through the web 
(though they seem to be a little impatient and hurried on
the phone, except for one guy in the film section who answered my questions 
patiently -- I wonder since film was the cheapest of all
the items I was buying).
2.  If you use the website, register for an account before you place any 
items on your shopping cart.
3.  Write down or print a copy of the items in your shopping cart every once 
in a while.  I feel like a fool for not doing that being
bitten the first time around.
4.  Btw, I did a "live chat" and the guy ("David-B") who told me that orders 
placed on phone ship faster than orders placed on the
web, so that might be yet another reason to do things the old fashioned way.

Btw, I am no newbie to the internet that doesn't know how to perform a 
simple shopping cart operation -- I have been working with
the internet since well the number of websites could be counted with the 
fingers on one hand, well maybe two hands, when there was
no Yahoo! and no "We have the largest collection of teen porn on the web" 
ads on the newsgroups (ah, those times!).  And this is
really the first website where I have had problems like this in placing an 
order (usually they have that part of the site all debugged out
quite well :-)

- -Satish


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