Order tracking: when too much information kills the information

After weeks of researching laptops, I finally bought one off a manufacturer’s website. Buying a laptop makes me feel like an impatient child at Christmas; I couldn’t prevent myself from checking the daily progress of the order to get an idea of when it would be delivered. However, even if order tracking stems as one of the most desirable ecommerce features to have, it doesn’t always address the users expectation. With this story, the paradox is not that the order tracking facility did not do the job; on the contrary it did it too well.

After having placed the order online, I found out that my laptop was to be assembled in China and that it would take up to two weeks to be shipped and delivered. A longer lead time than I had expected. After the laptop was dispatched from the plant, I received an email telling me I could now track my order on the UPS website.

And finally, here is what one and a half weeks of tracking orders taught me:

• My laptop went from Shanghai, Korea, Poland and Germany and then arrived in Birmingham UK
• When my computer was in Korea, “some exportation documents [were] missing in Stansted” (whatever this means.)
• My estimated delivery date changed 3 times.
• Every time the parcel was scanned, the order status changed, whether it was informative and relevant or not.

What’s the bottom line? The only thing I wanted to know using the order tracking feature was the status of the order: awaiting dispatch, collected, in transit, in delivery (more or less). For me, the other 85% of information was irrelevant, such as “parcel scanned at Shanghai arrival hub before departure”. In addition, reading everyday that my laptop was strolling around the world instead of flying straight to the UK was increasingly worrying. I don’t care how the UPS network works, I felt like I was kept salivating by making me believe that the order will reach its destination the following day.

Too much information kills the information. Knowing too much about the progress of my order drove me crazy in the end. By providing me with an exact copy of their parcel status log, UPS failed to offer meaningful information. The system is not flawed as such, but is not optimised.

What do you think? Should you only be told what you need to know? Or should you be kept entertained by being given every single detail…

This post was originally posted by Xavier Klingenfus