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Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Will Changes to the Mattycollector Ordering Experience Help?

Mattycollector has announced changes to their ordering process starting with the upcoming sale on 18th January:

"Toy Fans,

We’ve heard your comments and have been working hard behind the scenes to identify areas where we can improve your purchase experience. There are several changes coming during 2011, starting with our January 18th sale when we’ll be adding CAPTCHA functionality to our website.

You’ve probably all already encountered CAPTCHA or something like it… it’s where you have to type in a word or two to prove you’re a human and not a computer before you can go to the next screen. For our website, what this does is stop automated “bots” from having multiple carts going for the same user just to see which one gets through first. Having all those open carts is both overloading the system and slowing genuine customers from placing real orders. (Fun Fact: CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and HumansApart.)

So starting on January 18th, when you get to the cart screen you’ll see this before you can place your order:

Just type in the words shown on the screen and you’ll be on your way. That’s it! Since the site won’t be clogged up with those evil bots, this should help you make purchases faster plus increase the stability of the system. As additional enhancements to the website are ready, we’ll announce them here, in our Forums, on Facebook, and onTwitter so keep an (unautomated) eye out for them!

— Matty"

This is great news if, and only if, it actually helps, which I guess we'll know on 18 January, which I suspect will be a busy sale due to the MOTUC Palace Guards not being included in a subscription. While Matty's post seems the imply they're getting rid of the "bots", they're not actually being stopped from trying to order, so what impact this actually has on traffic remains to be seen.

Hopefully one of the "additional enhancements" coming up is an actual shopping cart that holds your selected items for a period of time. This would seem a basic feature, and the lack of such security has caused a great deal of grief in orders past.

What do you think about what impact is going to have on your ordering experience?


4 comments:

fishmilkshake said...

We shall see. Glad I don't want anything Matty has until the Legion boxed set.

Unknown said...

I hope this will help out seeing it has been near impossible to get through on the site to get anything.

Stephen said...

I just hope they get things settled before March when all the really good MOTU start being released!

Tom Freak said...

I don't order thingd from them anymore... I have a subscription for MOTUC and get all the other stuff from private sellers here. I said in the past that Mattel won't be the cause of my nervous breakdown!

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