Maybe running an online bookstore is hard.
Yesterday I got an email from Kobo with this:
I click the link because the title interests me enough to expend the effort to find out more. I get this:
Indeed, using the search bar I am able to find other books by Jeremy Robinson, and none of them are named Flux. (The books is available on amazon.ca at a current discount price of $5.99, so I bought it there.)
So why was Kobo recommending a book that was clearly no longer in the store? That simply shouldn’t happen.
It reminded me of another deficient part of Kobo’s site. If I leave a book in my cart for [x] amount of time, later buy the book (while it is still in my cart), I will get an email a day or so later urging me to buy the book, because their system obviously checks value [x] but does not check value [y] (has the book been purchased since [x]?)
These are both examples of not just bad design, but actively making the user experience worse and undermining the user’s confidence in the stability of the Kobo ebook store.
Kobo can and should do better.
