The worst part of online shopping

I love shopping online, especially when I can combine free shipping, with an item on sale AND a really sweet 10% off coupon... all while sitting at home in my jammies. Nope, you really can't beat it. But still, there are a ton of frustrating things about shopping online. And John Dvorak's recent column for PC Magazine (Online Shopping Frustrates Me) tackles a number of these issues, mostly dealing with outdated or just plain wonky shopping carts.

Nothing worse than typing in your full name, address, rank and serial number only to get an error and have all the forms cleared, so you get to start all over again. Thankfully, most browsers offer an AutoFill button that handles the bulk of that repetitive typing. (Though I'll be quick to add that even so, there are tons of sites where I'll use the AutoFill button and the fields are all messed up and my phone number is placed in the zipcode field, my email address is in the country, etc.) But one of the better ways to get around remember different usernames/passwords, credit card info, etc. is using Google Checkout. You just enter your personal info and credit card info once in your google account and then choose Google Checkout (if offered). So far I've had good success with it, although there are still a ton of online merchants who don't offer Google Checkout yet. So again, not the perfect solution.

It'd be great if some organization came forward to set a standard for online shopping. Similar to how the World Wide Web Consortium sets standard for how programmers can and should use HTML to create web pages, an Online Shopping Consortium should be set up to create standards for how shopping carts should be set up, how user info should be collected. Okay, maybe that's a little facist-like to an extreme, but in this day and age it's beyond ludicrous that some sites have such ridiculously pitiful and counter-intuitive methods for buying products. Heck, there are plenty of times where I can't even find the simple shopping cart icon or link at the top of the page to view my cart. Maybe I should take my own advice here and just start a simple list of style rules for online merchants to follow...