Buying on the Internet, using only https:// with plastic

Prior to first online purchase on the Internet, using a credit card in October 1996, the only English-language reading options for the past 25 years for this expatriate bookworm had been:

Purchasing online. But a tiny example of how the Internet has begun to change our world.

Purchasing on the Internet is a lot safer, and infinitely more convenient, than visiting the giant RioSul shopping mall across the street, or any other bricks-and-mortar establishment. And when it comes to giving gift-wrapped books overseas, well, online bookstores' service is just plain unmatched by any real world, in person book-buying experience.

Averaging almost a purchase a month read how each online store performed on both Rio delivery, as well as overseas delivery of the gifts we ordered. Standard international air mail s&h typically adds $10.00-13.00 to the price of each single-book order for Brazil. This is a factual analysis of 14 purchase transactions Oct'96 thru Jun'98 which speaks legions more than all those banner ads on the Web:

1. Good experience-
   • Amazon.com Inc., 6 orders, average number of days order to delivery = 28
   • Book Stacks Unlimited, Inc., 6 orders, average number of days = 23
2. Bad experience-
   • Barnes and Noble.com Inc., 1 order, still awaiting book shipped 5/29/1997 !
   • Sierra On-Line, Inc., 1 order, number of months = 3½

The low-down on all this:

Barnes and Noble.com immediately credited full amount of undelivered purchase to my credit card once I alerted them 7/13/97. They also told me to keep the book with their compliments when it arrived! There were a couple of earlier problems with B&N too. All attempts to track their shipping number online were rejected. Also, their 5/29/97 shipping email mentioned they were debiting my card twice the authorized total amount.

They readily admitted error in their system, which had mistakenly doubled all invoice amounts for shipments on that particular day, when I challenged this -- whew!

Coincidentally, a similar delay in receipt of goods had occurred with my very first order to Amazon.com but their reaction couldn't have been more different.

Amazon.com rushed a free second copy of the order by express courier within 48 hours of my email complaint (a shipping expense alone in excess of $55 according to the gratis DHL AWB), merely requesting that I return the original shipment to the mailman when it arrived. The first book did indeed arrive -- some three weeks later, and I returned it to the Brazilian Post Office. Amazon.com had addressed it correctly and Amazon.com had notified me of fulfillment matching the package frank. Even so, we all know snail mail is subject to the vagaries of high-speed Post Office electronic sorters which route snail mail to Rio over the fastest possible route -- via Bolivia & Paraguay in this particular instance :-( )

Sierra On-Line was a different experience altogether. First they said they had no record of the order two months after charging it to my credit card. Then they said it had been shipped. When I threatened a hullabaloo they said they'd credit back total purchase amount and would ship a complimentary second order. Freebie was received 21 days later. Their first shipment never arrived. Sierra On-Line refunded full purchase amount to my credit card same day they made the follow-up, complimentary shipment.

IMHO

Firsthand experience is unbeatable. The Internet is a wunderzeug for civilization. But it isn't going to change time-honoured business basics. PQS - Price, Quality and Service will continue to be the hallmark of all successful companies, large and small, on and off the Web.

I predict with critical emphasis the You-can-always-count-on-us-to-go-the-extra-mile-to-serve-you mindshare of Customer Service plus "Innovation with Value Added for the Customer" will be the key differentiator to displace the primary price & quality duopoly now that, from a cost viewpoint, the Web has leveled the playing field for almost any size enterprise.

Try tracking an order first time out on the Barnes and Noble.com home page, or your Account. Frustrated, huh? Well, no sweat, it's only a mouse-click to the We're-waiting-to-serve-you competition. And, the last few times I checked, the competition had better prices too.

Hey, why not let a free, quick, AI shopping agent like Jango® do all the legwork and sift the best-buy options for you unaided? We're living in the Age of the Web, remember? No time nor need to weigh subjective, distorted opinions like mine, right ;-)

Online Store Links

Click on my comment to browse right inside that store:

• Claims to be the Earth's Biggest Bookstore, top-notch customer service

  Amazon.com

• Has provided us flawless service with a smaller selection

  Book Stacks Unlimited

• The World's Largest Bookseller Online doesn't want my business

  BarnesandNoble.com

• Buy at your own risk

  Sierra On-Line

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This HTML was originally hand-coded using NotePad+ 1.11, an excellent Windows 95/NT 4.0 Notepad replacement, available as freeware copyrighted by Rogier Meurs.

In October 1998 I switched to what is proclaimed by its author, Jan Goyvaerts, as "The Best Postcardware Text Editor on Earth", namely EditPad version 3.4.0

Also use HTMLtool (2.5) extensively, created by Lorenz Graf. Read more about HTMLtool further down.
None of these tools (English version free, or almost) have revealed any serious conflict with Brazilian Portuguese Windows 95 nor Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 SP1 using Active Desktop unlike much of the more widely-distributed commercial software.

Why go to all this effort when there are so many good Tag Editors available? Well, here's a live example of the sort of browser discrepancy in the handling of cutting-edge HTML code.
In Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher, my email address appears in yellow on a black background as soon as you move your mouse over the line below Dynamic HTML Demo

Dynamic HTML Demo

Move mouse cursor anywhere over this line of text for my e-mail address

whereas nothing changes if using a Netscape Navigator browser.
(Press Reload button to revert to page-opening status if you want to re-test these Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher special HTML extensions)

For those who don't contemplate wasting time with the arcane niceties of HTML code yet want to put up pages on the Web, whether entry-level stuff like this or fancy and complex ones, I suggest evaluating these HTML Editors:

• HomeSite 4.0  $89.00 online from Allaire Corporation

  or,

• Microsoft's
  • FrontPage Express  included with free IE 4.0, then
  • FrontPage98.

Lest anyone think shareware or freeware HTML editors offer less than their commercial counterparts, think again. Sure, they are element-level tools, demanding a basic knowledge of HTML beforehand and requiring some ability to tinker with your PC software which the two major commercial distributions above do not. Hands on trial-and-error is probably the only realistic way to grasp a markup language. Serious web authoring demands mastering HTML, especially if you plan to venture into SMIL (pronounced "smile", for Synchronized Media Integration Language) — used for streaming media delivery — and other XML-type new generation languages.

From one year's experience in this field I can't recommend HTMLtool highly enough from a young German student. Hard to beat what HTMLtool 2.5 has to offer for its tiny $15.00 shareware licensing fee.

Before doing so, I'd still recommend grasping a handle on what the W3C HTML 3.2 or 4.0 spec is before you crack open any HTML Editor, to avoid becoming discouraged. The power of the Web phenomenon is its instantaneous, almost-zero-cost display of content, not the flashy features amok on too many sites that obscure the content. It may surprise many the humongous Yahoo!  site is entirely optimized for,  in Webtime years, ancient Netscape Navigator version 2.0.  Yahoo! is one of the few to recognize Web users are no different to those who browse books and magazines in bookstores and libraries. Any set of eyes can flip through pages in a book, and no special plug-in or browser is required to get usefulness out of a Yahoo! experience.

Any one of us with the time and patience, tenacity, and meticulous attention to detail, can master how to code in a markup language - it is not computer programming. Programming in Cobol, Perl, Java, C++ and so forth is only for those endowed with a very special set of logic skills. We don't compare nurses with doctors, nor should we compare HTML/Web authors -- professional graphics artists excluded -- with programmers. Even though, and I think explained by the novelty of the Web profession, a competent HTML coder may be earning equal to, or even more than an experienced programmer. This incongruity may not last more than five years if today's HTML authors fail to blend skills for successful marketing on the Web into the products and services they present.

Web commerce, E-commerce, E-business, whatever, is the way the world is headed. Remarkably, even as 1998 draws to a close, how it will get there remains an elusive and unknown science. In my view, 90% of the funds corporations are throwing into their E-commerce solutions will prove to be money thrown out of the window. It may take the most successful companies another five years to implement the fact E-commerce is not just a way of processing orders cheaply and more efficiently. Any organization that does not re-configure itself around its revolutionary, fully-integrated E-commerce core, and then conduct its business better than the competition, will be history. I'm as dogmatic as that, even while Amazon.com proves this with its soaring market value!

So, enough on this. Until reasonable compatibility is re-established between the two leading browsers I'll probably continue this laborious coding process, even though the HTML Editors mentioned above would reduce the effort involved to a fraction with far better results. Notwithstanding, much as ancient scribes toiled at their copperplate, I'll do utmost so any reader can, at the click of a mouse, read whatever it is I'm trying to produce -- regardless of browser.

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Copyright © 1998 David Lee-Warner http://come.to/davidlw Last updated on Solar System background featured on this page is borrowed from The Web Developer's Virtual Library .

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