techmouse

This was the first time I have participated in pre sale and I can’t say it was a positive experience, actually the opposite.
I’m software developer and did some e-commerce projects so I can sympathise with the team of DevOps trying their best when the site crashed just before the orders opened, but what happened next and the checkout process was in short usability nightmare.
As many I my self tried to preselected the phone before launch, that was wasted time as it appeared, next after filling signing in with my apple ID and filling up my informations again (common apple you have all the info from my apple account) and again for the collection only after selecting the day and time to kick me off and say it is not available anymore to select another day for collecting and filling all the info again. Than finally got to the clicking on order button and getting error message saying that payment info is incorrect ( after further investigation and calling the payment provider turned out the payment provider system crashed- Ok I can’t blame Apple for that, but the error message was just so misleading and you guessed it right refilling the form again, right now I gone from selecting 24 September to some time in November and my order is still in on hold, despite getting confirmation from the payment provider that the payment went through. At this point I’m thinking just cancelling the order and just wait for the phone to be normally available in shops some time in December- January maybe.
My question to apple and the checkout team is how hard can it be to pull my info from my profile first, let others who’s not buying it for them self to fill out the form, again with the collection details pull the info from the profile again and let people who are not buying it for the self to correct the details, third major improvement could be once you select the day and time slot give the user at least 5-10 minutes to complete rest of the checkout process before telling them that slot is not available anymore before you kick them out only to start everything all over again.
I thought the pre selling event will be dignified experience, but it turned to digital equivalent of people crushing each other in overcrowded Walmart in black Friday. I was never going to be standing queue in front of the store as I have better things to do, but this all process was pretty much no better than that. I’m still going to buy the phone and other Apple products, however never again on pre sale or shortly after release.