Christmas time is a happy time for retailers, and the bigger retailer you are -- the happier you must feel. All the frantic shoppers that spend the precious dollars even in the down economy help you with the largest sales season. And if you are a retailer, you want to make sure that the shopping experience for your clients is top notch. At least one would hope so. As a retailer you want to simplify the shopping with removing extra clicks between populating a virtual cart and the button “place order”, storing credit card numbers so that shoppers do not bail out for not having a credit card handy. You want to verify that all the customary e-mails informing shoppers about the status of their order are clear and concise. Sometimes the effort of simplifying things goes too far.
I placed an order through Amazon with one of the partner organizations. A usual e-mail confirmed that the order was submitted normally and a couple of days later another letter notified of the shipped product. The last letter even provided the tracking number. That’s where simplification went too far.
A FedEx tracking number is a 15-digit number. Unlike UPS shipping number, there are no letters in a FedEx number. When a system gets a series of digits, it may convert them to a number and make them more user-friendly. That “user-friendliness” is what happened in my case when I discovered that the shipping number was converted to a scientific notation as:
I placed an order through Amazon with one of the partner organizations. A usual e-mail confirmed that the order was submitted normally and a couple of days later another letter notified of the shipped product. The last letter even provided the tracking number. That’s where simplification went too far.
A FedEx tracking number is a 15-digit number. Unlike UPS shipping number, there are no letters in a FedEx number. When a system gets a series of digits, it may convert them to a number and make them more user-friendly. That “user-friendliness” is what happened in my case when I discovered that the shipping number was converted to a scientific notation as:
Carrier Tracking ID: 1.57858E+14
Yes, the order of magnitude for the number remains, but the precision is lost. Even worse, the tracking number is not exactly a number, but rather a string. Not having all digits makes the tracking useless. I do have to mention that I’ve been getting FedEx tracking numbers correctly formatted in the past, but this time simplification went too far. Please note, not all numbers can be treated like numbers and simplifying them does not simplify user experience. I will give it another chance to Amazon, but expect the engineers to fix such simple oversights.
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