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Staples – That was Not Easy

I’m a big believer in making backups of my computer hard drive so that I can run my business with the minimum of disruption when the main hard drive fails and I need to recover it. Staples offered my a $25 Coupon when spending $75 or more, so I went online and tried to order a Western Digital 1TB hard drive that support Firewire 800.

Staples

The first challenge that I encountered was that logging into www.staples.com is separate and not related to finding and adding a Rewards coupon. I found my login for www.staples.com but couldn’t remember my login for Staples Rewards. They had a link for forgotten username and I was able to supply an account number, so they gave me my forgotten username. Of course I didn’t know my password, however they let answer a challenge question, so good, now I have my proper Staples Rewards login and password.

I was able to find my coupons, add the $25.00, then start shopping for the hard drive. Western Digital had good reviews so I easily added it to my cart, then started the checkout process. Here’s where it gets frustrating. I typed in my Visa card info, but the web page came back saying that it didn’t match the address of the card. Uggh. I removed the company name, nope that didn’t work. I next removed the zip+4, and I got one step farther.

WD 1TB hard drive

Now it wanted to show me the complete order, for a final review, I accepted, uh oh, another error message about an address mismatch. Re-entered my address and card info three more times.

Fed up I called the 800 number for Staples, pushed the 1 button to get help with online sales, then waited. While waiting I gave the online checked two more tries, on the fifth try it finally accepted my credit card. Folks, that was Not easy.

I could’ve just jumped in my car, drove 2 miles to the Tualatin Staples, bought the hard drive and been back home in less time. I won’t use the Staples online system ever again, never, ever.

Summary

Moral of the story: Staples needs to review their online checkout experience because it is sorely lacking. Also, they need to have a single login, not two that are independent and unrelated.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Daniel Payne

    Update: To my delight a Staples truck just arrived at my home office, and they delivered the Western Digital hard drive. I bought this because it was Firewire 800, which is a bit faster than USB 2.0. After 30 minutes Time Machine now reports that it will take about 8 days to backup my 1,774,766 files. I wonder why Time Machine is so slow? Yesterday I just did a folder copy of Documents and that took under one hour. I did read in the Apple forums that Time Machine has recently become slow as molasses, especially when adding a new backup drive.

  2. Daniel Payne

    Update on the slow Time Machine backups. I read on an Apple forum how I could delete the /var/folders directory, then reboot. Solved my slow Time Machine issue, the backup took hours not days.

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