Thursday, May 14, 2009

Flying share


Another great example of how ignorance affects data quality from web forms (and can lose customers and money!) has come my way, this time courtesy of the site Flying Share. Flying Share are offering their users in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, via this form, a free USB drive.

All well and good until you get to the "ZIP" field (ZIP? Not outside the USA, good people of Flying Share - you probably mean "Postal code"). And there you find that the field will accept five characters and no more. So anybody in the UK or Canada wanting a free drive must either give up at this point, or provide a truncated code.

As drives are being sent out postally, there will clearly be a huge problem of undeliverable and returned drives. I know that this error has been pointed out to the company concerned, but no action has yet been taken, though correcting it would take seconds.

I do wonder at what point anybody at Flying Share will feel the need to act on this. Perhaps when the costs of returns reaches astronomical proportions? How many (potential) customers might they have lost before then?

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