James C. Liu's Weblog

Tuesday October 16, 2007

When websites lose customers

Losing Me in a Flash

Had a great morning today, and will be getting $392 in a check coming in the mail real soon.

Why?

Well, I cancelled my Citicard Cash-back rewards credit card. Been a customer since 1998, and used to use their card quite often when shopping, online and offline. My wife and I never had any issues really, until about Fall of 2006.

Some time last year, Citicards.com, and only that affiliate of Citigroup, started putting some really annoying flash media content on their home page/login page. At first it was just -only- annoying. On IE, it might look okay, but on Mozilla/Firefox, the flash blocked a quarter to half the screen. We could still login and access our account to pay. But in the Spring of 2007, the web developers up'ed the ante. They created a "chase-me" popup flash bubble that whited-out the whole screen and put a single marketing bubble that advertised a 7.24% equity line of credit or something like that. My wife was still fond of her Linux system, but she couldn't close the bubble. She tried to click on the [x] and the bubble kept re-appearing somewhere else.

She was late paying that month because we waited until the last day, and she forgot about the glitch and by the time, a few days later, that she told me about the browser problem, we were past due. I was able to login using Solaris Nevada with latest Firefox and it successfully negotiated the Flash bubbles and shut them down. And I made a quick payment for the entire card balance on line and told my wife to stop shopping for now with the card, since with most cards, they charge a late fee plus 2 months interest on the balance. So I called and told the customer service folks about the technical issue to discuss the possible late charges and interest charges. And because this was February/March, and the billing month was short, they gave me a 5 day reprieve and so I didn't pay any penalties or interest. Still, the hassle of having to make the phone call was irritating. Just to be sure, I used the online contact form (in Solaris Nevada) and wrote to them about the issue.

A month later, when all was good, we decided to use the card again. And again, the next month, when my wife was trying to pay the bills online, we couldn't get access. Again, I had to login from work and pay the bill. I wrote Citibank via their email/webform again and explained this situation, but this time, I threatened plainly that I would cancel the card and go away. I was/am a 1998 customer, excluded by a company because of foolish use of non-compliant content.

My wife and I put the cards away and stopped using them. It just so happened that I picked up a Capital One rewards offer in the mail that week, and decided to go online, and sign up. It was relatively easy and I got my new card in just a week or so. My wife got her card a few days after mine. And we've had no issues paying bills online. Solaris or Linux. We stopped using the Citicard and took it out of our wallet and left it at home.

The lack of activity on the Citibank card spurred Citibank to send me a notice. They sent new cards too, with the wireless PayPass chip inside to replace the old ones and sent us a little marketing brochure listing all the benefits of using the Citicard Master-Card. I did activate it thinking I might eventually use their card again.

This morning, in my regular routine of changing my online banking passwords and userIDs (which I do a couple times a year), I logged back into the Citicards.com site, and was greeted with a white blank screen. It was Flash. I checked and I have the latest Firefox and have the latest Flash available for Solaris x86 and yet, I had a blank white screen with nothing to click. I tried to turn off Javascript at first and was able to nullify the Flash load and login, but then got redirected to a page where their system said their site requires Javascript to run. I can understand if their site needs cookies, and I've designed cryptographic cookies that run cross browser (and implement a fully encrypted database with encrypted cookies with my kids' elementary school PTA website - which I'm webIT volunteer). But to mandate the use of JavaScript as well as Flash... well... I thought I could be smart and simply disable the plugin.

To disable it, I just moved the Flash plugin files from the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins directory to a temporary location and restarted the browser. After that, I was able to login and do my change my password and userID. But the thought came to me that my wife wouldn't know what the heck was wrong. This wasn't something she could do, and neither Solaris nor Linux would help her now. And we're now cut over primarily to Solaris. She hasn't booted Linux in quite a few months.

So I called Citicards Customer Support to cancel the card permanently. They were friendly. I talked with a "specialist" who made me some offers to extend my cash-back-reward to 5% for a year if I stayed with them. I said simply that I couldn't take the hassle of not being able to pay bills online because their web developers weren't testing and supporting other Operating Systems and browsers. Afterall, I had contacted them before on multiple occasions and told them exactly what the technical problem was. And seriously, I've designed a lot of web applications and done lots of cross-platform coding in my days and it doesn't take more work. It just takes awareness and not to fall into the trap of automated webtools that generate platform specific webcode.

Anyway, the agent finally relented in the marketing pitch and promised to send me a check for my remaining cash back reward for $392. Not bad. I wasn't aware I had that much remaining. That's a lot of online orders over the last year or so. I told him if his developers ever got their priorities straight and fixed the site, I'd come back. That was a promise. And their main site, Citibank.com, AmericanExpress.com, and Citimortgage.COM are all fine. Even their affiliate site, HomeDepot's AccountOnline.COM are fine. Those sites do use some flash here and there, but it's not overbearing or buggy on any platform I've used, including older Mozilla 1.7.x. So it can be done.

For now, if someone asks: What's in my wallet? Short answer: Capital One. I just went blazing through 45 seconds and paid my balance in full for last months shopping. Wow. Way too much fishing tackle and Fry's Electronics stuff. The only web feature I might want want from them is a masking feature that let's me obfuscate a merchant name with some other phrase - e.g. "Fry's Electronics" -> becomes "Hardware Electronic Education Materials," or "Cabela's Outdoor Outfitters" -> becomes "Recreational Outdoors Non-profit Endowment Foundation." October 16, 2007 10:31 AM PDT Permalink