Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Aarrgh!! Sports Authority Web App Fail

Gonna complain here. Sports Authority, you never fail to Piss Me Off. Every time I enter your store, the employees make me feel like I am intruding on their personal time. It takes for-evah to find what I want. And now, now I have "The League" to talk about.

Yes, I signed up for your customer loyalty program. With the level of activity in our family, I am regularly at your store.

So, I signed up, gave my info and my wife tried to use the card. Nope; we have to register on your website first.

I come to your website, enter the card number and my email address. Then I generate a secure 15 digit password. The form pukes; passwords have to be 7 - 14 characters. OK, my bad. I generate another password, this one is 14 characters. Enter. Hmm, the page doesn't refresh, maybe the old 15 digit password wasn't cleared. Generate a new password, copy it, carefully delete the current password and try again.

What? Another error message? Passwords have to be 7 - 14 characters. F-f-f-f-f-ffffff But it is!! Hey, I'm a smart guy; you probably also don't accept special characters. So I generate another password, 14 characters, but not special characters and resubmit.

Fails again. Now my email address doesn't match. WHY DIDN'T YOU MENTION THAT FIRST? And what happened to the new password I generated? Generate a new password and try another email address. Nope. Try another email address and yet another password. Nope.

Bail on the email address and use my phone number. With a new password; how many is that now? Hmm, 1, 2, 3, 7 or so. I'm going to have to clean up all the old entries from the password safe after I verify which one actually works. Crap.

I successfully log in and look at the email address right away. F-f-f-f-f-fffff!!!! It's the first email address I used, but in all caps. The !@#$ engineer isn't doing a case-insensitive match? Holy amateur, Batman!! 

OK, I hate you Sports Authority. Have crappy service and make my shopping experience lousy and I'll do everything to avoid your store until I have to go, but hire idiot programmers and put a amateur, 1990's type experience on the web today and you have earned my disdain.

Oh, but wait!!  There's more!

Just before clicking "accept", I read the terms.  If you spend $100 within a quarter -- not any three month period, but a calendar quarter -- then you get $5.00 back. Any unused points are reset to 0 with each quarter.

Wow.  I am totally underwhelmed.