It’s unfortunate that La Senza is now a terrible company
La Senza is now a terrible company after being such a great one back in the day, although back then, I never shopped on their site, only in-store.
La Senza is a Canadian lingerie chain has been around since Laurence Lewin founded it in 1990. Mr. Lewin passed over several years ago.
It used to have quality lingerie for great prices. We are talking real cotton, lovely sexy yet comfortable styles and colors, and the sizes always fit right.
I’m no longer in Canada and I don’t like Victoria Secret at all, so I decided that I would check out La Senza’s website https://www.lasenza.com/ and see if they can ship to the US.
Well this decision turned into a LONG drawn out drama that cost me countless hours of my life over the course of a week or so. Here’s what happened:
- I added things to my cart and the next time I went in, they were gone, so I had to re-shop all over again.
- The colors weren’t even close to being the colors I remember. They now have a lot more lame cheap looking printed patterns.
- Barely any 100% cotton panties which are the most healthy to wear. I won’t know the quality of the lingerie until it arrives in about two weeks.
- The site wouldn’t recognize my password or e-mail address. After being on hold for 6 minutes, I was told the IT department had it resent to me, but it would take upto 48 hours. Are you kidding me? LOL A reset of a password doesn’t come immediately?
I remember when I lived in Toronto that I read an article in “Toronto Life” magazine about how Canadians are behind the times when it comes to the Internet. That was back in 2000.
Over the next 12 years, I realized this was VERY true and now it’s 16 years later and it’s STILL true.
Most Canadian business people are extremely ignorant about the Internet. I’ve had business people tell me it’s a joke and they don’t consider it something worthy of a REAL business owner, or that they don’t have time to respond to e-mails.
They usually don’t know how to build and run a website. For that reason they hire the most unskilled labor to do these things for them.
I even had a copywriter tell me once that she couldn’t find ANY competition for her new Canadian client who owned a website or had any viable webcopy, so she had to find American competition.
I myself always had HUGE problems finding stores that carried something because most of them don’t know the FIRST thing about website content or SEO. Or these businesses just don’t care about having a website.
Clearly La Senza is NO different and my examples will show that although at least they have a website, as lame as it is.
- After waiting another hour and still no e-mail, I called and no one answered the phone during business hours, and I left a message.
The next day I received no call back, so I called again and spoke to a manager. She mentioned something briefly to me. Something I didn’t understand. It took another 20 minutes or so before she brought it up again. This is the long and short of it.
I signed up as a US customer, but when I was logging in, I was overseas. Their site is so poorly designed, so instead of just having ONE login for ALL people worldwide, they decided to create different logins for different countries. Because their site thought I wasn’t in the US, I was logging in from their Global site. I had originally signed up on another computer while using a VPN for the US which used a different URL.
This confusion cost me a lot of time and a lot of stress. And had people over there been smart enough (including the IT department), this would have been all fixed within a few minutes.
- The manager helped me to find the lingerie I needed, but when I tried to put it into my cart, the site was so poorly designed, it took twice as long to go back and forth between the cart and shopping. There were no checkmark boxes near the items so I could just add them all at once. Plus their site was VERY slow.
- When I tried to order, their shipping address and country fields were greyed out. I wasn’t able to type in there. I couldn’t even see any fields under payment method.
Because of the other login issues, I thought maybe it was because of my IP, so she spoke to tech, called me back and said she added in the data herself. But when I went back to order, I STILL couldn’t see what she typed in there.
I said just take my order over the phone. She said they can’t.
She said she would get back to me, but I never heard back. They were CLUELESS.
In the end, I was the ONE who figured out their issue. Their site was blocking me from ordering because I was ordering from outside the US. So I turned on my VPN to US and WHALLA, I was able to order.
PEOPLE please listen to me… some people order things, pay in USD and have them shipped overseas. With more and MORE people leaving North America to become expats, this is how we shop.
OR, some people overseas order gifts for people in the US. To create your site this way and block people is ludicrous.
While I got her to give me a small discount and free shipping, the amount of stress and lost time I went through just to order these things ($75 worth), just wasn’t worth it in the end.
- Their SSL certificate wasn’t working properly when I went to order.
- Once I was on their mailing list I started to get way too many e-mails all on the same day.
Unless you know your customers or list subscribers WANT to get bombarded by 3 e-mails per day, you shouldn’t send that many out. They were all trying to sell me when I just spent a lot already. It was way over the top!
And I also often got 2 of the same e-mail a few times.
When I just went to unsubscribe, their unsubscribe page didn’t know what e-mail I used to sign up with. This is list feature 101. DON’T make the customer type in their e-mail address.
Gawd, they need to hire me to revamp their entire website and e-commerce division.
- The discount she gave me was in Canadian dollars, NOT US, so I lost money because the Canadian dollar is worth less than the USD and I paid in USD.
- I had to resend my e-mail to her because after 7 days of not hearing back from her re: the refund being in Canadian dollars, I was getting perturbed again.
While the manager was nice and did spend time with me on the phone to get this rectified, if they knew what they were doing in the first place when it comes to e-commerce, this never would have happened.
Michelle
