The Mac customer base is expanding. Get ready.
Just this weekend, I have discovered two major store sites that hate either Mac users or their shareholders. Or both.
1) Nordstrom. No problem with searching and choosing, but the shopping cart/bag and buying procedure does not work on Safari. So, you can load up your shopping bag full of shoes and fun tights (you know, just as a random example), only to find that you can’t actually BUY the stuff.
A lot of people will walk away at this point. In my case, I really wanted the pair of shoes, so I fired up Firefox and bought those. I bought none of the other stuff as their punishment for having had their head up their ass. Also because a cooler head prevailed re: tights. They will get many many more in next month, but still, I would have bought something else.
I wrote to them, and they cheerfully (and promptly!) acknowledged that Mac users would need to use Firefox for their site. They didn’t make any excuses (no excuses is preferable) or try to tell me that hardly anyone used a Mac (a la the Gap, a really stupid move). However, they didn’t say “yeah we’re fixing that right now” either.
2) Victoria’s Secret. There are no pictures on the interior pages, only prices and drop-downs on the right. I kind of need a visual? Hello? eBay-ers do better than you, Victoria’s Secret. You should be ashamed.
In their case, I will not bother writing to them because I really doubt they would answer. I also will not be purchasing anything from them, but some of the annoyance with them is long-standing. I’m still pissed off about the puppy-or-dog thing.
Ignoring or annoying Mac users costs more money all the time as more people seem to be switching to Apple.
Next time you have the meeting wherein you decide not to support Safari with your website that could conceivably sell thousands of items a week, think “do we really want it to be harder to buy things from us?” If the answer is yes, then by all means, don’t support Macs. Go with an IE only solution or something. If the answer is no, then you need to support Safari.
As a developer, I can tell you that Safari is a piece of cake to support as it is enormously forgiving with Javascript, CSS and HTML. It’s *so* forgiving of bad Javascript, HTML and CSS that I can’t use it to check *anything* I’m developing because having it work in Safari does not mean it will work in Firefox or IE (I generally use Firefox for development and then check IE).
I can only conclude that they view Safari as some piss ant browser from a company that makes toy computers, and it is not worth supporting. As far as I can tell, Amazon has always supported it. My bank didn’t used to, but now does. Audible.com did not support Safari when I got my first Mac, and I still remember what a pain in that ass that was.
Making it a pain in that ass does not make people wish they had Windows, it just makes them mad. At you.
Anyway, the iPhones use Safari, more or less. Amazon has a special iPhone thing, but as I mentioned, they are on the ball. Most sites support it accidently.
If I want to quickly scan if, say, Victoria’s Secret has a new convertible bra before walking to that side of the mall, I should be able to do that. If I’m standing in the mall and no one has the shoes in the size I want, I might want to buy them from your website while I’m hot to do this I actually did this in St. Louis — I bought some Pumas from Delia’s on my phone after being unable to find my size in the mall.
I weep for their shareholders.
