One thing that will turn me off to a website almost instantly is when that website attempts to drive you into a local store to get basic information.  The other is a website that forces you to submit some sort of contact form to get info, which I almost never do.  But I don’t want to get into that right now as I’m concerned with the first case.  In my searches for home organization “stuff” I’ve tried to use the websites for both Home Depot and Lowe’s, with little success.

Home Depot’s site only seems to show items that they sell online.  For other items they force you to go into their stores just to get information.  I can understand that they wouldn’t want to sell certain items online, but they could at least give information on their products online so I can do some basic research and generate ideas.  By refusing to put their full product line online they effectively remove their site from consideration for me when I’m trying to come up with a solution, since I never know when a search of the site will turn up a useful item or a message telling me to go to the store.  Worse still is that items that they do carry online don’t seem to be in the stores.  I looked on their site to get an idea of the types of shelving hardware they carried.  I used the items I found to create a list which I took to the store.  But when I got to the store I couldn’t find that brand of hardware anywhere.  Fortunately they had almost equivalent items from Rubbermaid (wall standards, shelf brackets, and shelving).  But in the end, their website wasn’t even useful for my visit to the store.  I had to revise my plan in my head to fit the available items which weren’t on their site.  Finally, their site has some kind of bug with regards to item links.  If you’re browsing a category page and want to open an individual item’s page in a separate window you will instead get the category page again in the second window.  I tend to browse like this so I can examine an item without losing my place on the original page.  Because of this bug I have to wait for the (slow) category page to load in the second window and then wait again while the (slow) item page loads. 

As for Lowe’s, they are somewhat better, but only marginally.  They demand your ZIP code as soon as you start looking at items to determine if the items are available at the nearest store.  But I ran into an infuriating situation where when I clicked an item it informed me that it wasn’t available in the nearest store and my choices were to search again or continue browsing.  I interpreted the “continue” option to mean that I could see the item anyway, but selecting it returned me to the home page.  Frankly, that’s a crappy thing to do and it kind of ticked me off, since it interrupted my flow. 

In general a website should provide as much information as possible about the company’s available products.  The marketers may want to drive local store visits and revenue but this desire should never get in the way of the customer obtaining information.  Trying to make the customer fit into the company’s mold of how business should work will only annoy the customer and potentially drive that customer to look at a competitor. 

I kind of prefer Lowe’s over Home Depot, at least in that their stores seem to be a little nicer.  However, whichever of them that would allow me to browse their product line without hassling me about going to the store to get information would get more of my business.  If they want to drive store visits they can put messages on the product descriptions about store availability as long as they don’t prevent browsing the item based on that.  As an example, Radio Shack’s website is good about this.  It will show you the availability of an item both online and at your three closest stores.