InformationWeek

Here's all you need to do:

From the Golden Gate Ferry Web site, click on the link to www.basstickets.com; once there, click on "surf" at the top of the screen; at the "Venue/Facility" pulldown screen, click on the drop down arrow, scroll to "Golden Gate Ferry to Pac Bell" and click on it; then click on "find events"; then click on "Golden Gate Ferry Larkspur." You may now pick which games you wish to attend.

Which means more screens and more clicks. Assuming you've figured out that Golden Gate Ferry Larkspur is an event and Golden Gate Ferry to Pac Bell is a venue. And for successfully navigating this, you get to pay a "convenience fee" on the tickets.

Ever have an online buying experience like this? How about problems getting an E-mail query answered, getting a customer-service rep on the phone, or returning goods bought online? How about not being able to send your credit- card number with encryption to a major name-brand online retailer because you're on a Mac?

Take a number. You'll get your turn to speak.

Contrast this with the dozens of E-commerce company executives that I interview or hear at conferences. It's all about the customer, they say. Ease of use. Frictionless commerce. Fast and easy. Seamless buying experience. Web-site stickiness. Repeat buyers. Customer retention. Customer loyalty. Customer service.

Why does there seem to be such a gap between the rhetoric and the reality? The evidence is more than anecdotal. A Jupiter Communications survey of more than 3,100 online buyers last December found huge discrepancies between what Web-shopping customers valued and how satisfied they were. In all, 72% said customer service was important-but only 41% were satisfied with it.

There's a ticking time bomb for the E-commerce industry here, and a few Web executives know it. "With all the money spent on branding in this business, it's amazing to me how little is really spent on the customer experience," says Ticketmaster Online CitySearch CEO Charles Conn.

Marketers are starting to play off Web users' frustration. Just one day after my lovely half-hour on www .basstickets.com, my (postal) mailbox yielded a piece of good old-fashioned junk mail from the airline guide publisher OAG. "Get business travel information without the Web" (emphasis mine), it says. "All the information you need-no surfing required! There's no clicking. No waiting. No glitches." The information source? OAG's quarterly Business Travel Planner-that's right, the big, fat, dead-tree edition, delivered four times a year-"no electricity required."

Expect a lot more dot-com backlash marketing.

At Jupiter's MindShare conference in Napa, Calif., this month, Web executives readily admitted that the industry's obsession with customer acquisition in the "land-grab" phase often ignored the experience of those very customers. Figuring out product fulfillment, returns processing, and telephone customer support is not as much fun as launching and marketing a cool startup. "It means a lot of hard work, grinding it out," says one executive.

Buying online used to be such a cool novelty that early-adopter users would forgive some inconvenience and hassles. Those days are over. Unfortunately, some in the E-commerce business don't seem to understand that. "We're still in early days," they say. "It was years before the railroads (or the automobile or the airlines or the telephone) gave consistently reliable service. This is an evolutionary process."

Sorry, folks-that won't wash anymore. You've built up Web commerce as the greatest thing for consumers since the discount store, so you've surrendered the right to say, "Now just bear with us while we work out the kinks."

The Web can be a fantastic place to buy stuff, and when it is, yes, there's something magical about it. There are plenty of Web commerce sites that consistently deliver on that promise. For those that don't, maybe it's time to cut back on the marketing-strategy meetings and get back to work.