If you’re shopping for a lot of things at lowes.com, it’s a good idea to write down what you have in your shopping list before you hit the checkout or update quantiles buttons. I tried to order quite a few things from there today and when I went to update the quantities, I got the following error on nearly everything in my cart:

ERROR
Your requested change of quantity for [thing I was trying to BUY] can not be fulfilled at this time and has been reset to a quantity of 0.

Gee, thanks a lot Lowes.com. Thanks for allowing me to waste a couple hours of my life going through your site selecting things I wanted to give you money for, only for your screwy system to tell me most of the items cannot be fulfilled, and then go ahead and CLEAR MY CART of those items without much of a warning. How about a friendlier error message? Not only is it annoying to have to go back through the entire site finding what I had so I could write it down and see if they might have the same things at a nearest store (or at Home Depot), it’s pretty rude.

View screen shots of an attempt to order the light fixture and the errors that resulted. This is just a simple example of the annoyance. In my original order, I ordered the lights (or attempted to), along with a bunch of other stuff. So picture that red ERROR message about 17 times, followed by having all those items auto-cleared from the cart.

It turns out they did have everything I needed at the local Lowes store, so the web site was screwy. You’d think the ability to order things (that you know you want delivered through Lowes Home Delivery service) online instead of heading down to the store (which is about 3 towns over for me) would be a huge time saver. I guess not.

“Welcome to Lowes.com, we have cool flash video tutorials telling you how to do a lot of neat stuff, but we don’t want your business.”

Anyway, Lowes itself isn’t a bad store. It’s just their online shopping system that sucks. They need to fix that. Quick.

On a positive note, they’re running an interesting sweepstakes where you can win a $10,000 store gift card. Oh and it also includes an all expense paid trip to LA to visit and hobnob with the stars of the King of Queens sitcom. But who cares about that. There are 10 runner-up prizes of $500 gift cards and the contest ends April 15th.

http://www.cbs.com/…/king_of_queens/sweepstakes/lowes_2005/

They’re also running a 12-month no payment/no interest promotion on any purchase over $299 with their in-store Lowes card. This goes until April 11th 2005 I believe. Those deals are always pretty handy to grab things you need now and pay it off slowly with no finance charges. You just need to be sure to have the balance paid off before the end of the 12 months (April 2006) or they’ll hit you with the accumulated 12 months of interest that were waived (always read that small print).

Also, I think this deal only applies to in-store purchases. Further proof that lowes.com for shopping is annoying and a waste of time. Home Depot had a similar credit special last month and they included purchases made on their online site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2005 at 2:49 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.