Last night, I was shopping on the jcp.com site because I saw a few items on sale in the store’s ad that came with the Sunday paper. According to the ad, the sale applied to the online store. JCPenney marked ALL blankets at 40-50% off. In looking for the blankets, I noticed they were not marked down, so I went to “Today’s Store Ad,” turned to the last page where the blanket ad appeared, and clicked on it to buy it online.
As I weaved my way to the blankets from the ad, the prices were correctly marked down. But when I added them to my basket, the price shown was the regular price. Furthermore, when I returned to add another blanket of another color, the regular price appeared again.
I spent too much time trying to make it work. Finally, I stopped and emailed customer service. Got an immediate reply (auto-responder) saying the company will reply within 24 hours. Autoresponders for orders work well because it confirms your order went through the system (unlike on another site where I thought I submitted an order and received nothing… no receipt, no confirmation — turns out there was no order in the system).
The next morning, I already had a reply waiting for me (directly copied… so the “suppose” is the writer’s error):
If your prices are not coming out with the sale prices, please put in the special order instruction box what the prices are suppose to be. Once we receive your order the prices will be correct or you will be contacted with the problem. We do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.
One problem — the instruction box was only two short lines (like a gift card, which it wasn’t), but I managed to explain it with as few words as possible.
I had been looking for blankets for a long time and this was a good deal. Otherwise, I would’ve just moved on, so the company got lucky with this order. Business to business companies have a greater challenge since their purchases aren’t typically small nor cheap. Some may not have a check out process — but regardless, verify the usability of the checkout process and make sure the specials also work.