the online shopping experience

23 Jul, 2025

Unfortunately, I had to order some things off the internet again that the local shops don’t carry. I always dread this and put it off for as long as possible. That made me wonder: What happened? I remember a time when online shopping was a nice feeling, exciting even.

Well, if I online shop now, depending on the type of website, one or more of the following applies:

• Shitty cookie banner¹
• Intrusive modal to get me to sign up to their newsletter to get a coupon code
• Burger menus that are broken on mobile
• Unsure if legit business or dropshipper or scammer
• Product changes every few weeks so the product page is inconsistent
• Annoying product titles like “DGHIF 30x40 Water Cooker Leaf Juice 100 Degrees For Shelf In Kitchen Thermal Thickened White Gray Lid Organic Comfortable Silence Minimalism 100% Perfect Wife Gift Viral TikTok Trend”
• Unsure if sold by platform themselves or a third party via the “marketplace”
• Needing to make an account and being unable to order as a guest
• Automatically being opted into email harassment or letterbox harassment once you order
• Limited payment options
• Payment options that error out or don’t redirect so you can’t finish the transaction
• Unable to choose delivery company/delivering with the shittiest company you know

Instead of tackling these issues head-on with a rethinking of design choices, fixes, legislation and more, we are sold another tech solution instead; to just bypass most of it via

• Ordering at huge everything-sites (Amazon, AliExpress etc.)
• Letting Alexa order for you
• Soon, letting agentic AI order for you
• Having to go pick it up yourself via a parcel locker that is app-dependent

I don’t wanna have to do any of that. That means I have about 20 logins for different shops and I have to thwart their weird attempts to advertise to me every time. I have to fail at ordering 5 times before I find out their ordering process cannot handle including ‘ß’ in the address.

Afterwards, the joy of coordinating the delivery: Hoping the driver finds the address. Hoping they ring at the correct doorbell. Hoping it doesn’t get lost on the way. Hoping the correct item is even in there, it’s all complete, not broken, and not a bad knock-off slop product (not an issue if you already know the shop, bad if it’s your first time purchase). Hoping they aren’t rerouting it to the goddamn app-dependent locker. With shipping volume, the service quality decreased.

It’s not helping that we have made the entire online shopping experience worse as tech developments progressed and now we slap more tech on top to fix it. Like “Oh you know how inconvenient ordering things is? Why don’t you let Alexa or Copilot do it?” Gee I wonder who helped create this awful online shopping experience! Your tech got worse and worse so that you can sell new tech to overcome it.

I wonder how we’ll fix the emerging issues I see now, like convincing AI-generated product images so that you can’t even judge the real product anymore. Now it isn’t just stolen or badly photoshopped - it probably isn’t even a product that exists, and never will be, and may be impossible to produce! Can’t even check the customer reception because of AI-generated bot reviews² that sound fitting and sincere instead of the easy to spot bot reviews we previously had, making reviews useless.

I’m tired of that stuff. It sucks. I guess at least it saves me money and I stick to very select sites with the least of these problems, but it’s annoying anyway. I remember when Amazon was a tiny book platform and they reliably sent out the horse book series I was invested in as a kid. Now you can’t even order there anymore without supporting an unethical empire.

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Published 23 Jul, 2025

#2025