Sure I’m guilty of having some bad websites but I can’t resist smacking down ping-pong.com, a textbook case of how NOT to make a sales website.  After many frustrating attempts to find and order things I have been consistently thwarted by a bizarre combination of poor navigation and illogical structure.   The key problem with this site is that the company is often out of supplies, but has failed to integrate their inventory very effectively into the navigation.   Thus you need to click the tiny “inventory” link to find that … they pretty much don’t have what you are probably looking for – the things they’ve been listing elsewhere at the site as if they do have them.    I need some Table Tennis shoes, which are light and grippy and will hopefully will help me beat my good pals Charley and Kevin, both of whom already have table tennis shoes.   Here’s the inventory I found after clicking around for some time:

So, unless you are under 8 years old and surfing the site for this shoe you are out of luck.   Why not integrate the inventory such that people don’t have this extra step?     The one time I did buy from Ping-pong.com it took about 6 back and forth emails to finally find out they were OUT of what I wanted because in that case the inventory listings made it look like they did have it.   Thus they are wasting their time and mine as well as dropping orders and customers.    Easy to fix?   Of course it should be – they only feature a few thousand total products and therefore should be able to list inventory *on the same screens* as those that feature the products, saving the step and misunderstanding.  

So, NO SHOES FOR JOE, and thus I’ll have to struggle to beat Charley and Kevin.