Shopping

Any time you try to find products and prices online you learn interesting things about good and bad web sites.

Some thoughts from this morning's adventure:

• You can't see what Staples has for sale without giving them a ZIP code first. Irritating.


• Just try to find pocket folders at any of the big three office warehouse stores. Good luck.


• If you have a catalog, turn it into web pages. If the first thing I find on your site is that I have to download a 100-page catalog in PDF format, I'm going right back to Google to find someone else's web site. You've just lost my business.


• If you sell a lot of different products, don't design an inquiry form with required fields that don't relate to all of them. People like me will enter nonsense information with a note in the comments field that says, "All of that was a lie because I couldn't put the right info in your form." And you're already looking bad.

It amazes me that years after the web became the first stop for information for purchasing decisions, so many companies are still so terrible at using it.