Dear Yankee Candle,
I love your products. We're all about burning candles year 'round, both in and outside our home.
But damn. Seriously.
Your home page is so visually noisy and congested I'm not sure what I want to do first, except maybe leave.
And did I mention I LOVE your candles? My current favorite is Lavender Vanilla. If I'm not buying jar candles and tea lights for myself, I'm purchasing them as gifts (birthday, hostess, thanks for another drunk/fun weekend at your cottage, etc.) for friends and family.
What's more, your home page makes me squint. The links on the left look - for lack of a better word - fuzzy. Even zooming in doesn't help - they're just fuzzy. Plus the product photos are very small.
"Well, Heather, they're candles. How much detail do you need to see?"
Good point. But the small photos are just another symptom of a larger design issue - there's almost a stinginess in the design that makes the site feel crowded and claustrophobic - not at all like the open, welcome feeling I get when I'm in your stores.
Simply put, there's nothing clean or easy about the design of your web site and it makes me less inclined to shop there.
Furthermore, even though I wasn't logged in, I encountered this odd notification page:
I'd understand a session timeout if I were actually logged in, but I hadn't even added anything to the cart yet. Strange.
Worse, the session timeout happened AGAIN while I was in the middle of checking out. It gave me a 'click here to renew this session' option and took me back to the home page. Grrrrr.
Candles are supposed to be relaxing.
I guess it was a good thing the session timeout happened, because when I went back to checkout, I realized the nice note I'd written my Mom was too long (only 80 characters allowed) and there was no warning of this when I clicked forward to proceed with my checkout.
Okay, now I'm 15 minutes into this and I'm REALLY frustrated. Because the credit card in my profile expired in August, I keep getting the 'renew this session' link, even when I attempt to access the billing area of my profile to update it with the new card.
It won't let me check out. This hasn't happened on an e-commerce site since I can remember.
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I logout/login a couple times but it doesn't help. I switch browsers. Still can't get in to update my billing info. So I decide to do things the old-fashioned way and call. The number is located at the bottom of the screen which is helpful.
"All members of our customer loyalty team are assisting other customers. Your current wait time is two minutes, 19 seconds."
It was less than that, which is one of the only positive things I can say about the phone experience, even though the customer service rep I spoke with was very friendly and tried to be helpful.
"How would you feel if I just took your order over the phone?"
Yep. I didn't have the heart to tell her I was writing a review of the web site. It just didn't seem fair.
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I thought I found a work-around by adding a new billing profile but it still resulted in utter FAIL when I attempted to check out.
Since I can't purchase the candle I wanted, I'll just move on with the review:
There's whiz-bang e-commerce technology, and then there's too much. This is too much:
I don't even know which Candle Accessory Collection I want yet, and you're giving me too much information in a confined space. This comes off as technology for technology's sake, not to help shoppers discover more products on your site.
With regard to search, it's very slow. A search on 'berry and cedar' resulted in 67 items, with no way to refine the search or view. The 'we also recommend' items were boring - more jar candles - none of the jazzy cool Illuma-Lid thingies or toppers.
So guess what? I really need to wrap this up because a) I couldn't actually purchase a candle from the site and b) my head hurts from squinting at the fuzzy links.
That's $40 in sales that YC missed out on, 40 minutes of my time struggling to get it to work, and of course no candle for my Mom.
I sincerely hope Yankee Candle gets help for their site. They have fabulous products and I'm a huge fan but like I said, damn...Yankee Candle.
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