Selling online

I was trying to buy something online the other day and it was instructive.

The Good stuff:
The Website was visually interesting and distinctive, and they'd found a product niche where they had little competition. The tone was casual and genuine, and the personality of the business and its people came through very clearly. They'd made good use of graphical elements and telling their story to mark out a very distinct little plot of the Internet. They even had good word of mouth, since that's how I found them in the first place. Their prices were good and they had a good array of payment options - I love to see options like Discover, Amex, and Paypal. All awesome.

The not good stuff:
The form to enter my "Identity theft" data wasn't secure (no https, lots of browser warnings about insecure transport and eavesdropping)

The credit card validation kept failing with a generic error. I kept re-typing the number, address and verification code and it just kept saying "enter a valid credit card". By the third time I'd very carefully entered all my data and it failed again, I became convinced that all I was doing was sending my CC and Identity theft info off to hackers in Malaysia, or somewhere. I became certain that it the bank had already blocked it because the hackers had hit my credit limit. I became convinced it had already been used to purchase nuclear materials in the middle East. I was already resigning myself to a two-year stint of trying to track down and correct all the damage done by my identity theft. This is not the emotional experience you want me to have at your online store. It turns out it failed unless I checked the "save my card in my profile" box. Which just added to my uneasiness. This guy can't even validate a credit card correctly and now he wants my permission to save all this data?

I'm sitting here typing this now and I'm kind of wondering why I persisted.

I got the expected "Thanks for your order - we'll email you a confirmation" page, but a confirmatory email didn't arrive. For days. Yes, I checked my spam folder (though I have yet to see Gmail blow it like that). Eventually, I went back to check on my order (because I'd had to save my Credit Card data, I now had a profile), and my order was just sitting there with a status of "Pending". Pending what? Pending you running my credit card up to the limit? Pending a delivery from the wholesaler? Pending whenever we get around to it? Is there a way to inquire about the order? No contact information on the order status page. No email form, to either the business or the webmaster. No way to cancel the order either, which is kind of a leech tactic.

There's a "customer service" link which has a FAQ behind it that claims they ship all orders received before 12PM on the same day. Well, I know that's a lie. At least there's a snail mail address at the bottom of the FAQ. No phone number though. Here's the very best part: On the customer service FAQ, there's a big block of reassuring text, but it's "loren ipsum" Literally. I'm Sooooooo happy I let you keep my credit card information.

Finally I googled them based on the business name and their snail mail address and got a phone number. It turned out to be one of the other businesses this guy was running. These days we understand about multiple streams of income, so that wasn't that disconcerting, once the receptionist and I worked through it. But it was definitely a shame that he didn't cross-refer between the websites of all his (fairly closely related) businesses. Anyway, I left a message. Let's see what happens.