Trish wanted to drop some money at Kohls.com while taking advantage of a sale, but because she took too long to complete her order, the site erased her checkout cart and she lost track of what she wanted to buy.

As a result, she gave up and Kohl’s lost a customer. She explains:

A friend told me I could find a ring I was interested in at Kohl’s so I checked their website yesterday. The ring was there and on sale over half off. While looking at it I noticed a similar ring pop up on their little you-might-also-like-this deal on the side of the page. Apparently this is marketing that works because I decided, what the heck, I’ll get it too since it was also on sale. So they have an ad on the front page talking about how you can get another discount and free shipping but turns out that’s only if you have their store card so I figure I’m out of luck there and will have to fork over the $7 needed to ship two small rings but then I see they’ll ship free if you spend $75.

I decide to browse and see what I could find (again, another bit of marketing working). So off-and-on over a couple hours I check back to their site (never closing the page) and find a few more things I’d like and at some point I realize I must have plenty enough to get me to $75 and go to checkout. Wow, would you look at that – empty shopping cart! Apparently Kohl’s emptys your shopping card for inactivity so everything I’d been trying to buy from them was now gone. Guess I’m a really slow shopper. I’d just spent some real time and effort navigating their site so I figured I’d go back later that night and figure it out again. Unfortunately I was too busy and that didn’t happen. I did get back to it this morning but, would you look at that, the sale is now gone and everything costs twice as much as it did yesterday. As someone who doesn’t really shop at Kohl’s I’d been kind of happy with my experience up until this point, even with the screwed up cart thing, and they were about to get a new customer – someone who would have even started visiting their stores. Now I’m not so interested.

After thinking about that I decided I’d shoot them an email and let them know they should really change their site because it isn’t doing them any favors. Unfortunately their email process at kohls.com doesn’t seem to work either (once you navigate to the “contact us” section you have to fill in 3 fields with your name and e-mail then pick an issue in a drop down, I did something related to shopping their site, but when you click “go” it does nothing but get rid of the info you filled in). I guess they’ll never get to know they lost a new customer because at this point I’m not going to waste any more time trying to call them about my efforts to order from them.

Techies, what’s the rationale for the Kohl’s site behaving in such a manner? And if you’ve felt similarly burned while shopping online, please share your story.

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