Sites like Amazon are seem to be consistent globally (I have purchased from the UK and German sites, and have viewed the US site); for online grocery shopping the major retailers have good sites, booking train, air and coach travel is easy either through the vendor or through a 3rd party. There are number of smaller independent sites for specialist purchases.

How are you finding using the internet and interacting with UK companies a challenge daily?

I have seen good and bad examples of websites in both the UK and the US, the Costco UK website is one of those bad examples. I do think the design of sites varies quite a lot between the UK and US, this does not mean a loss of functionality, but quite often has been carried out to improve the user experience and is perhaps reflective of cultural differences; for example I have found several US guesthouse/small hotel sites which feature music, but find this rarely, if at all with UK sites.

And I agree, it does reflect badly on Costco as a whole since it is is a representation of their brand in these various countries.

I agree with the author, the Costco UK website is appalling. I recently enquired with their member services team what the difference was between individual and trade membership was, they didn’t even bother to mention the difference in retail hours in the email, what they did say about the individual membership was that it was restricted to certain groups; pretty much this covered current or retired public sector workers, airline and financial services, and anyone qualified in a range of professions many of whom would probably be self employed and eligible for trade membership.

Something I found particularly confusing about the ‘Find your nearest warehouse’ drop down list was the inclusion of ‘Home Office’. I did wonder if this was perhaps a specialist warehouse dedicated to office and stationary products (a Costco version of Staples); as this is what I was after I called the number, from the ACD prompts it was clear this was the number for the HEAD Office.

Looking at the metadata for the site it appears is was created in Office 2000, it indicates it was Word, but it could be FrontPage, either option would be very wrong. The metadata also indicates that the pages have not been updated since December 2003 (by the now IT Director)!

It reflects badly on Costco that the build and information quality of the costco.co.uk site is so poor; that there is no online ordering option, as they lag far behind other retailers in the UK (despite Gerry’s misinformation about eCommerce over here) and that the individual membership is so restricted. Given the warehouses aren’t that accessible by public transport (if you have to get a bus from a train or tube stop I consider it a bit of a schlep) you’d think they want to promote themselves a bit better by making people aware what they sell and making some, if not all of it available to order online.

There are items on costco.com I would like to order, which I know the have previously had in stock in the UK warehouses and are no longer available, though the UK staff I have spoken to on the phone have been helpful when I’ve made enquiries. I should also add that the item numbers on the US site don’t seem to tally with those used in the UK (when given to staff to stock check over the phone), though this could be due to the item no longer being available in the UK; so although they do sometimes stock the same items, it doesn’t sound like there’s homogeny with their systems. One other thing I did notice about the US site (aside from not shipping internationally) is how the product id which forms part of the query string is not the same as the item number. e.g. Prodid=11134074 for Item # 112865