BestBuy.com (Best Buy) in store pickup...

A few days ago, I tried the in store pickup option offered at BestBuy.com for the first time. In a nutshell, the process is:

• add items to your cart
• choose a preferred store
• check inventory at that store
• place an order with the intent of the order being picked by an associate and ready to pickup at the customer service counter by you

I've used a similar system at CircuitCity.com in the past and it was trouble free. This is not the case after my interactions with Best Buy.

I had a handful of items that were last minute gifts for Christmas. Best Buy has a great website that has a boat load of product on it, and it just so happens that they allegedly had all the items in stock that I was looking for. I ran through the order process, selected one of the three stores that are within 20 minutes of me and submitted.

According to BestBuy.com, there were two emails that I was waiting for: an order confirmation email and a stock confirmation email. At this point, the stock confirmation email worried me. I realized that there is a retail/corporate/web database issue here and that more than likely, BestBuy.com was not running a realtime inventory database system ala WalMart. I trudged on though, thinking that the little items that I was ordering weren't on the 'Top Gifts of Christmas 2007 list'.

I used my Gmail address for the order, as I have for almost all important things lately (another post for another day), as email generally arrives to it nearly instantaneously. I wasn't disappointed this time either, as the order confirmation arrived before I even left the BestBuy.com site. However, things went differently with the second of two stock confirmation emails. The first listed two of the items as being in stock in the store; they were ready, come pick them up. The second listed two of the items as not being in stock.

Because I wanted to grab all the items in one shot, I called the 800 number from the website and cancelled my order. This was a completely pain-free operation.

Now, I'm not blasting Best BuyorBestBuy.com for this. I just think that they need to improve the process a bit. There are a few suggestions that would have made me a happier comsumer:

• Don't dish out multiple emails for the stock confirmation. After receiving the first email, my first assumption was that they were just scanning the items as they picked them and that the other items were going to be in an email to follow. This turned out to be true, but in my case, they didn't have the items in stock
• After receiving one email with all the stock statuses, there should be a cancellation option linked right from the email. If all the items are in stock, I'm alright with not including it. If even one item is not in stock, add the link.
• Fix the inventory tracking system that links with BestBuy.com. This drives me crazy with banks too, but it's nearly 2008! There is no reason that checks need 5 days to clear and there is certainly no reason that inventory updates should not be nearly real time. Walmart has been doing this for years, so there's no excuse!