It’s Friday, so I thought we’d start the weekend with a humorous error message from the PayPal Help Center. Click on the thumbnail below to see the Help Center not being helpful at all…

Apparently, there’s no help anywhere if PayPal can’t answer your question right away. Not only is there nothing in the left-hand column, but there is no sign of these help categories anywhere else on the page. By not matching the site’s copy to the reality of the page they’ve left an already frustrated PayPal account-holder at a total dead-end.

Don’t forget how important your site’s copy is to the way customers navigate and interact with your site. If a site’s links or copy promise something your site can’t deliver customers will waste no time going elsewhere. Take a lesson from PayPal’s mistake: Make sure that if you say it’s there, help is “to the left.”

Just a quick reminder that Blog Business Summit is getting closer and closer, and we’re sponsoring! If you’re an eCommerce blogger and want to hone your business blogging skills, this conference will be a great time to do it. Use the code below to get $100 off of your registration fees and see what all of the excitement is about.

Varien Discount Code: P17CHI

We’re here in San Jose scoping out the Internet Retailer Conference, and finding plenty on the exhibit floor to keep us busy. Below are a few photos of still-in-progress excitement:

Keep your eyes open for us tomorrow, if you didn’t get the chance to talk to us today… we’re the attractive bunch in the sweet Magento shirts. We’ll be happy to answer your questions, and get you as excited as we are about what’s to come from Varien!

Usually in this space, I try to present to you a few things that you can do to improve your customer service by presenting examples of what has been done right around the web. Today, however, we’re going to look at an example of customer service that has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Recently, a customer placed an order for 300 CDRs from Buy.com. Instead of getting the two 150-packs he had ordered, he instead received two 100-packs. Since they were the right brand, he shot off an e-mail asking Buy.com to simply send him another package of 100 CDRs, and began using the packs he had received. Obviously, Buy.com would send him the CDs and the issue would be taken care of in a prompt manner, right?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy.

After a dozen e-mails thus far with the customer repeating himself several times with almost no change in the e-mails he received from customer support, the issue still has not been resolved. Obviously, throughout the exchange, not one human has bothered to actually read his e-mails! This is insanity! You have to check out the entire e-mail exchange… I dare you not to feel an intense anger and frustration as both a customer and a retailer at how insanely unhelpful Buy.com’s automated “customer service” is. Hopefully, your own site’s customer support is lightyears away from this complete travesty.

Cleaning up your store’s act is more important than ever in the age of Web 2.0. The Luxury Institute reports that over 84% of consumers who earn more than $150,000 annually regularly visit websites that review and rate retailers and restaurants. If you are one of the many online retailers that target these consumers, don’t let these results scare you. Instead, take it as an opportunity to review your customer service policies and take a look at the reviews for your own site and your products. As noted in the article,

Across the luxury spectrum, nimble luxury firms understand the world has just become transparent and there is nowhere to hide,” says Milton Pedraza, CEO of The Luxury Institute, a research organization. “If you have rigid customer processes such as onerous return policies, confusing fees, conflicted endorsements, etc., fix them now and favor the customer. If you are not socially responsible, bet that consumers will gang up on you online.”

From the Varien family to yours, Happy Holidays.

Because it’s the week before Christmas and we’re busy over here I’ll keep this post short and sweet. Can you believe the discount Amazon is offering on this plush sheep? How do they make a profit offering discounts like that?

We haven’t been able to post anything like this for a while because, well because nothing like a 3-year old buying a car on eBay or a baby toupee company has come around recently.

But Bill Watkins, CEO of hard-drive company Seagate, Watkins dropped this gem at a meeting with journalists,

Let’s face it, we’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn.

Gotta love the candid CEO.

And just yesterday I learned of a fakeyourspace.com by way of the blog Mashable. The company was selling fake friend pictures for $.99 a pop, but checking today I see that Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers have already sent cease-and-desist letters and the site has been taken down.

Halloween, what have you done to these poor children? Yes it is cute to see little firefighters and princesses in their parents arms as they chaperone older children around the neighborhood. But baby toupees? Donald Trump baby toupees, no less? I mean, this is stupid. Unfortunately it’s stupid like a fox.

For those of you who don’t recognize the typeface and layout, that’s the Drudge Report. Oh ya, the marketing lesson in all of this is if you come up with an idea dumb enough you can be assured to get press. Even worse, the press release for the site wants people putting these things on their kids for more than Halloween.

“The infant hairpieces are perfect gifts for baby showers, birthday parties, play groups, costume parties, Halloween, and more.”

And while the company says the wigs are to “show that while parenting can be a great responsibility, it can also be a source of endless amusement,” this fits right in with a 3-year-old boy buying a convertible on eBay and some dumb punk getting busted for selling pot on Craigslist. It must be Friday.

Seriously? I think this lady just realized she didn’t want a pink car, but according to CNET,

Jack Neal briefly became the proud owner of a pink convertible car after he managed to buy it for 9,000 pounds ($17,000) on the Internet despite being only 3 years old.
Jack’s mother told the BBC that she had left her password for the eBay auction site in her computer, and her son used the “Buy It Now” option to complete the purchase.

The seller agreed to relist the car and not push it on Jack and his mother. Scarier than 3 year olds buying things online is the fact that there are currently 25 pink cars for sale on eBay motors in the UK. eBay America? Only 6. Score one for us.