Stuff I Came Across When I Was Trying To Spend Money— #2
Stuff I Came Across When I Was Trying To Spend Money is emptycart’s new occasional series. In it, we share several UX-related things we stumbled upon during our online shopping endeavours. We’ll also let you know if we actually bought anything.
Things I tried to spend money on this week: a new laptop.
Time spent trying to spend money: a lot of hours.
Was any actual money spent this week?: yes, but not online.
Stuff I came across: weird deals, zero results, and genius translations.
I would count my trusty MacBook Air among my best friends, but after 5 busy years it’s time for an upgrade (again, just like my best friends). And after thinking about it for months, it’s time for action and to just go ahead and replace the thing.
#1: Weird package deals.
As I’m Dutch, I want the best bang for my buck. So in search of my new laptop, I first stopped by our online electronics supermarket: MediaMarkt. They currently have a “ProductPlus” deal in which you buy one (mostly overpriced) product and can buy another for 1 euro. I don’t know who curates these “deals” but it doesn’t feel like they put much thought in the selection process:
#2: Zero results.
I hop over to our national blue behemoth Bol.com (a.k.a. the Dutch Amazon) to see what kind of advice they can give me. After a couple of search queries for “MacBook Pro” I only find some results that lead me to second-hand offerings, which is not what I’m looking for. So I take the leap and check out their handy laptop advisor. I tell the advisor that I am looking for a laptop for everyday use and that it should be between 12 and 14” wide and it shows me… no results.
#3: Genius translations.
Fine — let’s go straight to the big one. For a while now, Amazon has been making its sneaky entrance into the Dutch market. It is pretty hard to discover, though, as you‘ll need to visit a spin-off of the German site through “https://www.amazon.de/nl” (if you go to our national TLD directly you will end up in a 1995-style Amazon bookstore).
So, when you’re visiting the world’s largest e-tailer, you could expect some intelligence, right?
Your search query “macbook pro” has been automatically translated to “macbook pro”. The genius is nearly unfathomable.
#4: Accessory switcheroos.
So I’m continuing my search for my new MacBook and, as I’ll be living the dongle life, I look through the accessories people have bought while buying their MacBook Pro. And apparently, they’re are adding Nintendo Switch screen protectors to their basket.
Honestly, when will the day arrive when a ‘more like you’ recommendation actually hits the mark?
#5: No advice whatsoever.
In the end I still had some questions that I needed answered (how much RAM do I need, do I need that beefy i7 Processor?). While searching for those answers (and not finding them) I came across a deal at a Dutch Apple Premium Reseller that was only available offline, due to some weird restriction. I jumped on my trusted bicycle (also up for renewal — materialism, yay!), talked to the guy there and ended up buying at the store instead of spending cash online.
Stuff I Came Across When I Was Trying To Spend Money is emptycart’s occasional series. In it, we share several UX-related things we stumbled upon during our online shopping endeavours. If you enjoyed this article, please hit those little 👏 below (you can “clap” multiple times!).
Happy shopping — see you next time!
