Will's Web Watch: Let's get ecommerce right?

In my previous column I sang the praises of lastminute.com for excellent customer service and their 'human touch' which broke down some of the barriers inherent in the faceless world of call centres and CRM.

But sadly as a regular (Visa may even say prolific) online shopper, my experiences aren't all good - in fact some are far from it, and unfortunately this is a fact which is still holding back ecommerce.

If it wasn't bad enough that concerns about security have been an immovable - and largely unjustified - obstacle for companies encouraging consumers to get online, unfulfilled orders, wrongly fulfilled orders, false advertising, pricing mistakes and a variety of other faults and flaws have all combined to undermine ecommerce.

Everybody has their own nightmare stories - and companies may well claim they are isolated incidents, but by the time everybody has suffered an 'isolated incident', the question marks over online shopping are fairly universally aired.

The problem with ecommerce is that when it goes well, it's great, but as soon as there are problems, the flaws become all too obvious - such as the hassle of posting returned goods, often by recorded delivery; raising complaints and finding a real person to talk to - the list goes on.

Perhaps I'm just being incredibly unlucky - and I need to stress there are still far more good experiences of ecommerce than the handful of bad - but problems when shopping online are still too common. Following on from my blunder on lastminute.com, I recently ran into a couple of other problems - thankfully neither was of my own making this time.

The first one was with a CD. I had been looking for an album, only available on import which featured a bonus track not included on the European release - for the record it's a cover version of the Rolling Stones song Wild Horses, but that's neither here nor there.

I thought I'd found what I was looking for online, both versions of the album were clearly advertised, but sadly what turned up was the European version despite me ordering the import- yet I'd still been charged the much higher import price - which I thought was a nice ruse, charge import prices and ship European versions, but rest assured it was good old human error.

Naturally I returned the CD and received a replacement. But ecommerce is meant to be easier than shopping on the high street - you don't need this hassle. By the time you've ordered, waited, opened, read, listened, been disappointed, packed up, posted, waited, opened, read, listened and liked you may as well have walked half way round town looking in record stores.

And now my second incident. As a football fan and a devotee of the beautiful game's great players, I last week ordered a retro football shirt - a 1974 Holland shirt, with the two stripes down the sleeve. Now, to me this was an important detail, as it was unique to just one shirt through history - the number 14 worn by Johan Cruyff (he personally unpicked his third Adidas stripe in order to be individual - just in case being the best European footballer of his day didn't make him stand out enough).

What I got in the post was a 1960s Holland shirt as worn by... well nobody quite frankly - Dutch football didn't really even register until the 1970s total football revolution, but I digress.

In fairness to both companies the customer service they showed after the initial mistake was outstanding. In both instances an individual took ownership of my complaints and the problems were resolved speedily. Despite concerns that ecommerce can be impersonal both companies revealed the kind of human touch I so praised with lastminute.com.

But ecommerce constantly needs to prove it can be better than the high street in every way - and that's a responsibility which must be met on a technological and human resources level.

People are already more wary of ecommerce and companies in this space must work harder than shops in order to even keep up. The benefits of the internet are that it has a far larger catchment area than shops. It can be more niche, offer more products, or specialist products to collectors and offer all manner of the weird and wonderful.

But retailers also have to remember that is what they are - they must sell, and sell well. By getting the basics right they can drive the numbers of people shopping online and finally we can turn the high streets back into parks - so grown men can run around in retro shirts playing football with their mates.