The web still has the capacity to delight and disappoint me in equal measure. Recently I experienced examples of both extremes on exactly the same day.

Extremely good

Threadless  sells t-shirts, and sells them well. Limited edition t-shirts, designed by anyone who wants to design them, and voted into production by the Threadless community.

On their site, as on many others, I often use the basket as an ongoing wish-list, collecting the stuff that I might buy if and when the conditions are right. But if you do this with Threadless' basket you stand a fair chance of missing one of those limited edition t-shirts. So Threadless have come up with a nice email to let you know when this is going to happen, and here it is:

The call to action is strong, the tone of voice cheeky and familiar but still polite ("thank you from your pals at Threadless.com”).

Extremely…. well, bad

That very same day I received a film and ink pack for my photo printer; I'd ordered them online having done a little research and ordered a pack of 100. However the pack that I got in the post was only a 50. Frustrated, I telephoned the supplier:

10 Man on phone: "What was the product code on the invoice?"
20 Me: "CO3548"
30 Man on the phone: "that's the 50 pack"
40 Me: "Well your website and the email confirmation says its the 100 pack"
50 Man on phone: "What was the product code on the invoice?"
60 GOTO 20
RUN

In the end the query was passed on to someone else and while waiting for the call back I thought I'd check my order online and log into my account. Perhaps I was flustered from the phone conversation, but I made a mistake with my password. This is what greeted me:

Okay so now I'm not just a little miffed but in fact somewhat teed off, let's just read this out loud together:

"Internet fraud is a serious offence..."
"we record IP addresses to help trace the location of fraudulent transaction attempts"

Wow

Adding insult to injury, I now have the wrong item in my hands and I feel just a little bit criminalised to boot. I waited in anticipation of the call to come and the website left me in quite a self-righteous, unhappy customer kind of state.

In the end the call back was really good: there was an apology, a reason (well an excuse - data entry error), and they sent me the right product out in exchange. Even so, the experience was unsatisfactory and inconvenient and I'm unlikely to use the site again.

If only the site could have reflected their (eventually) helpful manner in resolving the problem; and if only Threadless sold photo paper.