today's customer wtf

[dragonlady7]

So one of the things we sell on Zesty Etsy is film transfer services. Like, you have old movies, so you send them to us and we send them back with a DVD. This seems obvious, right? Like-- all the steps of this seem reasonably obvious if you think about it, right?
You have a thing. You want the thing to be readable in another format. So you take the thing you have, and let me know where this loses you-- you purchase our listing, right, so that we know to expect your thing and can assign you an order number. Then you, again let me know if this is confusing, you send us the thing. Right? Confusing? Make sense?
Then we do our thing, and in a little while, however long this takes, we mail it back to you, and you get it, and all is great.
Right?

Right?

We just had a guy file a PayPal dispute with us because we hadn't transferred his movies for him and it had been a month.
I'd emailed him four or five times to ask him where his movies were. He wrote back, confusingly, saying we hadn't sent them.

We finally refunded him his money when he sent an incoherent screed, which we're really not sure what he meant by it. But he never sent us anything, and I'm not... really sure where we lost him, so.

Just. IDK, I don't know how to make the listing any plainer. (When you buy it, you get a confirmation email that says "Great! Now mail the stuff to [ADDRESS] using the shipping method of your choice!") (Because people were emailing me saying they didn't know where to mail it. Now, it used to just say it in the listing, and long long ago I printed it across the sole image associated with the listing, because Etsy's new layout actively discourages you from reading the text of any listings and I get that, but it really does like to show you the images, so the address being on the image made it easier. But now it actually gets emailed to you with your receipt. I don't know what else to do.)

Comments

[dine]

clearly, you're supposed to drive to their house and knock on the door, asking for the film to be converted.

see icon for my opinion on 'people'

[dragonlady7]

I. I don't know.

The only and most charitable thing I can come up with is that he saw an ad somewhere for a service like this that, I don't know, maybe sends you a box or something? Like, you place your order and they send you something to mail it back in? I don't know how that would work-- how would you know how big a box to send?? wouldn't that just add so much time and hassle?? not to mention expense??
But like, he saw an ad, so he Googled it, and found our listing and bought it, and then just assumed he could disregard everything the actual listing said on the actual page?

That is the only thing I can imagine, but never having seen any such advertisement, and also being a human who actually lives in this world and understands that you've got to read listings that you buy so you know what to expect from them, and also someone who understands that just because you saw something doesn't mean that everyone else in the world saw that same thing at the same time???

(I was thinking of that today, we have a remote warehouse who we VPN into to print invoices, and the guy there who packs orders called today and was like "so the order I just did, it blah blah blah blah" and finally I was like "uh... what order did you just do?" "The one you sent." "I sent you fifty orders this morning, which one was it?" "The first one." ... He really just expected me to know which one he meant, because he knew, and despite being a man in his forties, is not entirely clear on the part where I can't read his mind.)

[krait]

People are not good at directions!

The number of people who call me because they want to donate to the charity I work at in memory of someone, but can't figure out how to do this online...

I really have run out of polite ways to say Are you on the donation page? Do you see the tickybox that says 'Dedicate this donation in memory of someone' right underneath the amount? As in, second line on the entire page? Yes? Okay, did you click it? Why not?

[dragonlady7]

Like, listen, as I age my ADHD gets worse and worse and sometimes I am confronted with a block of text and I do my damnedest to read it-- and I used to be good at that, I know I was, I was super good at reading and following directions-- and it is like the words are made of fucking lava and I come out totally lost. I know this. I have so much sympathy for this. I have worked for twenty years to get more succinct when I write things because my brain has melted simultaneously over that time, and my eyes glaze over when things are Too Much. I am *there*.
And so the directions on that listing are fucking fine-honed masterpieces, ok, there is NOTHING you do not need to know in there, there are no digressions. It is bright red bold 18-point text on that picture and it says MAIL YOUR SHIT TO THIS ADDRESS and then under that in plain text it says MAIL YOUR SHIT TO THIS ADDRESS.

I don't know what else to do, I am not driving to people's houses to click the fucking button.