Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Companies, please let me give you money

Posted by Tyler King

I'm moving in to a new apartment complex and I'm required to buy renters insurance. Because renters insurance is relatively cheap and it covers things that I really don't need insurance for in the first place, I decided that it wasn't worth shopping around too much. I'd just Google "Renters Insurance" and buy from the first organic result assuming it was within the price range that I expected.

Of the first five Google results I saw (which may differ from the first five you see if you do the same search, fyi) two of the sites didn't have the option of buying online (no, I won't call your 800 number). The other three had online quote forms. One by one, I went through the online quote forms and one by one, they all failed to work correctly.

The first two had some sort of unnecessary javascript so when I clicked the button, the form never actually submitted. I'm using Chrome which is a somewhat obscure browser, but I make websites for a living and I know that Chrome handles javascript better than any other browser out there. If something works in IE and Firefox, it almost certainly works in Chrome too. The third website was the worst. I filled out the entire form, got a quote, decided to buy, entered my credit card info and was then told "Sorry, we can't offer insurance for your apartment".

Regardless of what a company does, every business needs to be good at at least one thing: accepting money. If you can't accept money, it really doesn't matter how great your products or services are because no one can pay for them. I had my credit card out, ready to give $200 to the first company that would accept it and the top Google results all failed at that simple task.

As a side note, I'm about to start doing some work on the Less Annoying Software billing system so I'm almost glad I had such a hard time buying renters insurance. Now I have a fresh example in my mind of how important it is to have Less Annoying Billing in addition to Less Annoying Software.

Tags: Less Annoying Software, Bad Software, Billing

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This is a blog for small businesses interested in how they can better use technology. Most tech is targetted at either individual consumers or huge corporations. We'll help you find the tools that are powerful enough to help run your business, but simple enough that you won't need an I.T. team to use them.

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