Rakuten.com: new name needs a new checkout

I was looking for a Samsung solid state drive (ssd) for my computer, so headed over to Rakuten.com (which you might know better by it’s former name, Buy.com). I knew just what I wanted, so when I got to the site, I entered “samsung ssd” into the search function. The search results showed me a few options. However, I couldn’t see the price for the product I wanted. It just said “Special Price” and wouldn’t display the actual price.

I navigated to the product page, but it still didn’t tell me the cost of the product. I had to add the item to my cart, which I did. A window popped up to tell me the item was added to my cart, and it also said I would have to proceed to the checkout to see the price. Okay, that’s not a huge deal. I have seen this from other retailers before, and some manufacturers have restrictions on this. I decided to go ahead with it. While I had this pop-up open, I also added one of the suggested products to my cart as well. Good cross sale feature!

Here’s where things started to get annoying. I had to go through almost the entire checkout process to find out the price of this item! After entering all my shipping, billing AND payment information, then I finally learned the price. That is pretty frustrating. It can make shoppers very uneasy to have to put in all their payment info without seeing the total cost first! I would suggest allowing customers to see the price before entering their payment.

Finally, when I did get to this last step, I decided I didn’t want the ssd after all. And now we get to the big problem: how do I remove it from my order? I looked all around this checkout page, and I thought I would have to start over to remove the ssd from my cart. I finally noticed the small “Change” link in the Items header, but it was too late. I had already given up on this site.

I would really suggest that Rakuten.com make this checkout process a whole lot easier to use, and make it easier to find the edit cart link. I’m sure I’m not the first to abandon my cart, but this site should take steps to keep more shoppers from doing the same.