Community News

[#1]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to give you all a heads up that futureshop.ca (the retail website) will be closed for scheduled maintenance from 9pm PST to 6am PST tonight (or shortly thereafter).  During this time, you may notice that some images are missing and links are broken in the Community.  The Community Forum will be staying up during this time, but we're expecting that the header banner (and perhaps other images) will be down temporarily, please use the "go to" drop down menu to navigate during this period.

With regards to the Shout-Out Awards, although the rules state that voting begins at 12:01am PST Friday morning, we won't be able to start at this time as the site will be closed until at least 6am PST (which is where the voting tool lives).  Once we're good to go, I'll post the URL Friday morning.

UPDATE Feb 5 815am PST: the voting tool is experiencing some "technical difficulties" and we're working on getting it fixed.  I'll update when it's fully functioning.

Thanks for your understanding.

[#2]

Will we be seeing a new look to futureshop.ca or is this a lot of backgorund stuff being done?

JB

[#3]

Hi Juice0904,

Mostly back end

Laura

[#4]

I like the Old Site better. It use to be one click instant response... Now i have to wait for a bit... Not cool

[#5]

It's the first day.  There's bound to be a few bugs while they fix everything up to make it fully functional again.  The trick is to get the main parts of the site back up and running as quickly as possible and fill in the rest of the gaps over time.

JB

[#6]

New site is.. interesting.
Slow but thats to be expected on the first day.

Is there a way to have it auto show if the item is in stock for your store? The old site once you put in the store you wanted would show the status when you went to new products.
Now im finding that every time i want to see if an item is in stock i have to re-enter the store, and it takes you to a new page with the results. Very time consuming when im trying to look up multiple products. It was very nice to have that right on the product page instead of having to go to a new page each time.

[#7]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the feedback, I'll pass it along.  Regarding the speed, Juice0904 is right, it will get faster!  Day 1 is always a bit slow as the pages are being cached and everything worked out.

Cheers,

Laura

[#8]

Not happy with the new site at all, even after giving a couple weeks for you to do post-launch damage control.

Usability and functionality has been slashed, and formerly useful product information has been totally dropped.  It's slow and there are frequent error messages and other blatant bugs.

CS has been saying throughout to be patient while you fix problems, but as of yesterday they are now saying no further work is being done and the degraded site is now permanent.

They also said the management person accountable for the web store doesn't have email and only works through snail mail.  If true, that's inexcusable.

CS advised that they have no way to relay customer feedback to management.  They advise me to come here and post this feedback because management people lurk and read what customers put here.  It seems like a crazy back door way of contacting management, but its what your CS said to do.

I hope someone can get over the pride of wanting to stand behind the new web store, even if it is a flop.  For the sake of the customers, you need to seriously consider some major rework, or swallow your pride and restore the old store. 

[#9]

Getting lots of browser errors saying the script is slowing your computer, did you want to abort.

Also getting prompted a lot to log in to an ad media server.

Can someone call management and see about switching back to the old working site?

[#10]

Hi Chuck1,

Thanks for your feedback.  I can assure you that work on the new platform is far from done, in fact it will never be done.  We will always be working on improving it, and we thank you for your patience and ideas!

There is a link at the top right of the box that has the price information on every single product detail page that says "Product Feedback" - if you see any errors, you can send the info there and it gets read daily.  Alternatively, you can send an email to service@futureshop.com.

You're welcome to snail mail your feedback, but we do have email and it gets here a lot faster this way

I'll pass your comments along to the web team and also back to Customer Service so that they can clarify with the agents on the points you've stated.

Cheers,
Laura

[#11]

Well another week has elapsed and the site continues to be horribly slow... slower than before even!

As for the changes with CS, yes they have altered what they are saying.  Unfortunately they are now redirecting blame back to the customers!  I was told it must be my computer or ISP causing the problems.  That's ridiculous as every other web site is fast on the same computer and ISP.  And Future Shop is dead slow and error packed on any computer I use with any ISP. 

Laura it also sounds maybe I wasn't clear on what I meant by errors.  I don't mean a price error such as $20 item price charging $25.  I mean software and content errors. 

You suggest that I send product feedback when I see a listing with errors.  I'm sorry but I haven't got time to submit hundreds of thousands of product feedbacks for every movie and music album which now contains 90% less information than it used to. 

When will top management be notified that the site has devolved severely?  When will someone either fix it or admit defeat and switch back to the old site?

You should be paying users for doing the testing that your IT department was paid for but failed to do.

Here are more specifics:

 search for DVD+R's.  You'll find DVD-R's appearing under DVD+R and numerous product SKU's that SHOULD be listed under DVD+R are just missing.

Also the search logic seems to be using 'or' in every case.  Search for 'wireless router' and after a disturbingly long wait you'll get 1750 responses... but Future Shop only carries less than 100 wifi routers.  It appears flawed coding is searching for anything that has wireless OR router, making the search useless for the customer and probably crushing your already bogged down site servers.

So if you search for "wireless and router" you don't get a list of any sort, you get pushed to a single sku, an obsolete apple time capsule which is quite unlikely to be what the customer wanted the search to return.

It's frustrating to see such severe web site problems persist for week after week with further slowdowns and no sign of any progress or even so much as an honest admission that there are severe problems.  It's even more frustrating to know that the fix is utterly simple... go back to the previous web site code that was speedy and worked just fine.

It leads people to wonder why implement such a terrible web store and why ignore the outcry of customers telling you how bad it is?  Well the only major change seems to be the inclusion of admedia and adjuggler banners - and it wouldn't surprise me at all if its these mandatory ad banners that have completely bogged down your whole site.

Future Shop seems to have decided to smother web store customers with unwanted commercials and advertising... and they don't seem concern about how badly this has wrecked the customer experience.

Laura I'm sure you're trying your best but you should notify your boss's boss's boss that there is a major web store mess on your hands and you need help pronto.

[#12]

We're over a month into this web fiasco and the site is actually getting SLOWER instead of faster! 

Errors, lockups and extreme slowness seem to be happening with even more frequency.  This whole web store has become a really black eye for the company.

Now your customer service is telling people that you are working very hard to try and restore the old web site and ditch this new one.  While that's good to finally hear, it's bewildering how long it's taking to actually accomplish.  They also say you don't have an estimate day or time when you will completely revert back.  That's pretty questionable that your technicians can't even tell you when they will complete the restore?

You could have simply ordered one of your own USB drives and backed up the site and then it would be a one evening restore job.   There's no reason a simple restore like this should take weeks and weeks.  Something very fishy is happening here.

[#13]

The new website for Future Shop is absolutely dead slow and useless. When selecting a link, the new page loads and loads and loads and loads. My mouse pointer is unable to select anything until the page does whatever it is doing in the background. It looks like it is loaded but is completely unusable for the longest time. I wanted to buy a Wii or an XBox 360 today from Future Shop. I am going over to (competitor) instead.