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The recent premature expiration of my dishwasher and
consequent development of dishpan hands lead me to search online for a
replacement product.
My past appliance purchasing experiences with Lowes stores have
been very positive and this lead me to look first to Lowes.ca. Once on the Lowes.ca homepage I decide to
look under the Deals & Flyers tab, I love a good bargain. Under the Deals & Flyers tab I found the
weekly promotions button and off I went.
Once in the weekly promotions section I found the ‘BIG’ Appliance
Sale’ Button. That seemed like the place to be.
Click and what? The appliances section? I
thought I was going to a sale section? Disappointed, I opted to navigate to the
dishwashers' section via the left hand menu.
Faced with multiple pages of
dishwashers the best course of action appeared to be finding a way to sort the options. Enter the ‘sort by’ button. Found on the upper right hand side of the
display I was delighted to find an ‘on sale’ sort option.
Apparently this is a very ‘BIG’ appliance sale as there was
still a very large number of options to review.
Looking for a way to narrow the field further I found the filters on the
left hand side of the screen. Selecting first to narrow by ‘Built-in’ models
and then adding both stainless finishes on the interior and exterior I began to
wonder if the filters were being added to one another or just overriding one
another. Seeing as my priority was price I added a maximum price filter which
then disabled me adding any further filters.
More confusion.
With no further options in regards to filters the next option
was to pick a few models to ‘compare’.
Selecting 5 potential models I proceeded to click the ‘compare’ button
in the upper right corner.
The comparison did not provide much in the way of relevant information. As a consumer I am looking to find out about
rack configurations, capacity, volume levels, wash cycles, cycle lengths. Instead I was given a list of dimensions and useless
data. At this point I am feeling more and more that a trip to a bricks and
mortar store is going to be necessary.
My last effort is to select the models I find most
interesting and review them individually.
Although all of the models I researched were described
according to different specifications and displayed in differing layouts with varying
terminology I did manage to decipher most of the details and in the end there
is a winner. On to the shopping cart we
go!
So now we are going to go to the checkout. I am so excited, I am going to get a new
dishwasher, my poor dishpan hands will get a break soon. Then, boom!
I am deflated. There is a red
screen, red is not good. Apparently my
choice is not available at my selected store?
But I thought I was ordering online?!
Can I change the store? That
particular option is nowhere to be found.
The ‘Start Secure Checkout’ button is still green so I guess that maybe
this will be sorted out once I get to the ‘Secure Checkout window’.
Nope, another warning that my selection cannot be ordered
right now and there is no suggestion as to how to sort this out. I am at a dead end. I suppose I could select a different model
but I like this one. Time to head to a
store.
The process of shopping for a dishwasher can be
overwhelming. Perhaps thinking it could be
completed online was overly optimistic.
Lowes as an organization is all about customer service therefore it was
not baseless to think that perhaps their website might be consumer friendly.
There was a lack of consistency with menu location and data
comparison. Navigating and comparing of
products was very difficult. Product descriptions
included details irrelevant to consumer decision making and were formatted inconsistently
and with differing terminology.
On the positive side I was able to narrow down my options. Coming away from the search I actually have a
very good idea of which model I am interested in but it will require a trip to
the physical store. Not being able to
complete the order online was disappointing. Twenty-five clicks and no product to show for it seems like a very low return on
investment. My dishpan hands are not amused.
All screens shots courtesy of Lowes.ca.
