The Big O-My-God They Suck

Like a gimpy Amazon.com, Overstock.com has been limping along since 1997 selling cheap crap online. Towels, phones, Xbox games, custom jewelry -- pretty much anything they could turn a buck off of.

Then sometime last year, Overstock decided it wanted to run with the big boys. They splashed the airwaves with some vaguely racy ads, opened a frequent customer account called Club O and even entered the online auction market.

But like a Ford Mustang II painted a the snazzy color, it's still just a lousy old beater with delusions of grandeur.

Which brings me to my story about how Overstock sucks nards. See, last week I broke my PC trying to swap out memory sticks. Do I not know my own strength? Possibly. Am I a klutz? Yeah, sounds about right. Anyway, after the usual trial and error testing, I narrowed it down to a busted motherboard and went online to order a new one. Lo and behold, Froogle finds the cheapest one for me at -- ta da -- Overstock. Just $65, which is a good price for a motherboard this advanced.

From this point on, Overstock does so many things wrong that it's almost hard to keep track without a handy guide. So here it is.

Error #1: I had decided to splurge and pay $15 extra to get 2-4 day delivery instead of 3-5. Sure enough, they get it here five days later (on the fourth business day). Technically accurate, I suppose, but not warm-feeling-inducing.

Error #2: During the five days I'm waiting, their site never updates to indicate that the package has left their hands, a fact which prompts me to initiate a chat session with their support staff. Before I could even finish my line of questioning, the helpbot was asking if I wanted to add some useless product to my cart. They even pasted a handy URL into the chat window that unfortunately obscured the text I was trying to read. Call that error #3.

Now we come to error #4, which should actually be errors #4-10: they sent the wrong motherboard. Seems to me the whole point of automating an order process is so that no one confuses an Intel D865PERC P4 with an Intel D845PESV ATX. Hell, I can barely tell the damn things apart, but guess what? That's not my job.

Here they are: similar looking, but actually very very different.



When I call to get this corrected, guess what? The phone flunky says I have to wait for a return box to arrive, then I send back the incorrect motherboard, THEN they'll put my correct product in the mail. Expected turnaround time? 10+ days. Error #5.

I ask to speak to someone who can really fix this problem, and I get put on hold for 15 minutes. (Error #6.) Phone flunky's manager Clint manages to knock the transaction down to a two-day delivery (Overstock won't spring for overnight delivery because it's "half the cost of the product"). But just as we're finishing up, he says I should see the motherboard in 2-4 days.

You guessed it: error #7. Overstock can't just pull an item off the shelf and ship it. It takes 1-2 days just to get the damn thing out of the warehouse. Clint seems surprised that this surprises me. I asked Clint why Overstock wouldn't spring for overnight in the interest of establishing long-term relationships the way Amazon does, and his answer was just a verbose version of "Guh?"

In a few days, this transaction will hopefully be over, as will my relationship with overrated Overstock.

2/18/2005 update: Hard to believe, but Overstock managed to do one more thing wrong even after our transaction was seemingly complete.