What I would do if I had a webshop
This morning I had a conversation with one of the most passionate and greatest danish media bloggers – Mads Kristensen where I told him, that these days I weren’t too pleased with Threadless – a really great artistic community, with a really bad european customer service.
I had a pretty bad experience with them in january where they refused to send me a new t-shirt even though there was a pretty bad error on one of the t-shirts that I received for my husbands birthday. Their return policy is really not effective when it comes to Europe, mainly because they want to have returned t-shirts with errors on. Problem is that sending the T-shirt back to the US costs twice the amount of the actual t-shirt. So I don’t believe that threadless receives a lot of faulty t’s from Europe.
Anyway they asked me to photodocument the t-shirt in a couple of pictures, which took me about an hour, and in the end they still didn’t want to send me a new t-shirt (even though it was the machinery’s fault)..
nevermind. I think that this threadless case can be shared amongst the rest of us to inspire – and it has inspired me to give a couple of advices on what I would do, if I had a webshop.
so if I had a webshop:
I would pay for shipping both to and from the customer. It get’s rid of the Penny gap and enhances buying motives – like zappos
I would totally do a shop that didn’t do the normal shop cms’ lists – think a bit out of the box.
I would have a blog to describe creative things to do with products, and what happened behind the webshop – like Howies
I would do events together with other webshops inside my field, and actually facility online by offline, and let my customers meet.
I would give things away for free – in order to support the products that I wanted people to buy.
I would do really well by doing really good – and show people I did good.
I would be cool and un-salespitchy and not-interruptive.
I would have great parties in my web-house (or my webshop)
I would oppone something instead of compete against other webshops. Opponing a higher cause makes you smile brighter
I would do development projects and give a part of my sales to a great cause.
If I could I would totally give my customers ecological alternatives – by now there’s no excuse not to
What would you do if you had a webshop ?
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4 Responses
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Henriette
he – I would too, but thank you so much =)
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Hey Henriette,
couldn’t agree more on you! I’m also a Threadless fan, and sometime ago I sent them an email stating that they needed to understand that for europeans, they’re shop we’re really like features, for instance, it’s not reasonable to buy a single t-shirt, due to the post charges, so we need to make bulk orders, but due to the threadless model when you complete a set of t-shirts, some of them aren’t available anymore, in the end I suggested that they create a system were you could ‘deposit’ money, and you would buy t-shirts, until you make a certain amount and then they would be sent to you. Answer: NO due to stock reasons.
A the time, and I don’t recall their exact words, I recall that I felt that: 1st. they were really interested in the European Market and 2nd that it’s all a matter of money, in the end, they probably have more customers than they expected already, so it may be suffice for them and I guess that’s OK as well…
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I really also want to state that I am a threadless fan. But europe fails for them. I also asked them if I had thought about doing eco t-shirts since they would have a HUGE impact on getting eco out to geeks – guess what they said – “NO – due to stock reasons”.
I guess what really pissed me off is that they made me waste an hour taking pictures of the t and sending it to them by mail. I think that when I stated that the T was so bad in print that my husband wouldn’t wear it – they should have shipped me a new one, right away.
I guess I am just spoiled like that by companies like zappos and howies – But I really think it could be a major thing for them in the future, that the customer service sucks (for europe, I can’t really talk about the US)
I’d make my website in cooperation with you!