Membership has its rewards but its Web site stinks

My wife and I just finished a wild online shopping spree on the American Express Membership Rewards site. I use the words “wild” and “spree” with my tongue firmly wedged in my cheek because Amex does little to make the Rewards redemption process enjoyable or simple.

The reason for the spree was that over the last year we had acquired a large number of points. We recently decided that the American Express card was less useful than it used to be for us, so it was time to dump the Rewards points we had accumulated before we got rid of the cards. Thus we were determined to spend early for next Christmas (we’re normally done with present buying by October but at this rate we’ll have ’em wrapped by August this year).

So spend we did, but the Membership Rewards site made the experience somewhere between irritating and maddening. Amex’s Web site manages to commit a number of obvious blunders that, amazingly, management apparently has no knowledge of – perhaps because no executive is in charge of giving a damn.

The site suffers from pervasive navigation problems. For example if you select, say, a gift card, select its value, number of cards, and add it (or them) to your “basket” you are taken straight to your basket summary which is beside a whole load of “Other rewards you might like” – a pretty random collection of offers at best. This means that should you be so foolish to want to buy more gift cards (perhaps of a different value) you have to navigate non-intuitively to get back to where you can make your selection. By non-intuitively I mean that a naïve user who doesn’t think to use “go back” isn’t offered such a choice and has to navigate using the menu structure.

This is a common Web design problem: The vendor is moving the user’s focus without a good reason – in this case there is no reason to visit the basket until you want to edit its contents or check out.

Another thing that annoyed me was that during our spree we kept hitting a sort of 404. After following a link to an item on the site a Web page randomly appeared claiming that Amex was currently having problems and we should try again in an hour! This is an incredible thing to have happen and does nothing for consumer confidence, or consumer anger management.

Now the more cynical might suggest that Amex doesn’t care if our experience on the Membership Rewards site stinks – they would rather we didn’t cash in our points and thus put yet more money in their coffers. While that could be the case it would also be self-defeating as it would ultimately destroy the whole marketing concept.

Nope, I think this is yet another example of a vendor that just isn’t paying attention. No one at Amex is thinking about quality and consumer satisfaction, so they run a second rate Web site thinking that they are offering a first rate service.

Despite my dissatisfaction with the American Express Membership Rewards site we did get our shopping done, wiped out our points, and we’re going to be so ready for Christmas we will hardly know what to do with our free time. Membership may have its rewards, but now that I will never have to cash them in again, I’ll be a little bit happier.