I use my AOL inbox for newsletter subscriptions and random administrative email. It’s also a magnet for a ton of marketing email, about half of which is outright spam.

I wind up deleting a lot of email.

Anyway, among the 732 emails I had yesterday there was one from Amazon that caught my eye. It told me I can download pilot episodes of four new NBC shows for free. Pretty good deal. Except that Amazon uses Unbox, which isn’t compatible with my iPod, so I’m not going to bother downloading them.

Hey, NBC: It’s fine that you want to stick it to Apple and deal with Amazon instead, but wouldn’t it be a bigger stick to them if you did it in a way such that with an easy workaround we could still watch the shows on our iPods? Amazon would get the traffic and the eventual payback from subsequent series purchases, you’d get the online viewers and incremental sales you want and Apple’s 160-gig iPods get filled up that much faster. It’s a win-win-win.

Speaking of win-win-wins, here’s a lose-lose for you. I thought I might try downloading a game to my iPod, so I went to the iTunes store and found a few that looked good. But iTunes won’t let me buy them: The games aren’t currently available in the U.S., it says (see the graphic accompanying this post). So why did iTunes let me add them to my shopping cart in the first place?

But wait, there’s more: iTunes won’t let me remove the games from my shopping cart, either. Same message. Now here’s the open question: If I buy a song, will I wind up also buying these two games that are stuck in my shopping cart that I no longer want? I’m not willing to try it to see if $9.98 filters into Apple’s coffers in error, so for now I’m not buying anything at all from iTunes.

No music for me, no income for Apple. Yep, that’s a lose-lose. I wonder how many other iTunes users are bumping into the same or similar issues that are preventing them from purchasing anything.

Takeaway for marketers: A lot of things can go wrong on the way to closing an online sale. What’s the weakest link in your e-commerce chain?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Marketing Stuff, Marketing Takeaways.