With Christmas around the corner many have already started the Christmas shopping experience. I have received several store coupons through the mail along with catalogs. Some of these catalogs are from stores I have never shopped at and a few I have never even heard of. Do companies send out these advertisements and catalogs around the holidays to get new customers? Of course they do. I receive a catalog from LTD Commodities a few times a year and I have only ordered from them once. They have been sending me catalogs for probably three years now even though I have not placed an order from them in years. Every time I receive one of there catalogs I get excited to look through it. They have really neat stuff for the most part and they are reasonably priced. I often times mark the pages of the items that I would like to purchase and look over it for a few weeks. If any one has received one of there catalogs you will know that they are usually pretty thick and have probably close to 200 pages.
I find myself never following through with the purchase decision though. They have a mail in order form to send back but I automatically think that that option will take to long. I would have to mail it off and they wouldn't receive it for around 5 days. Then it would take 3-5 days for the order to process then another 5 days to get my order. The whole process could take up to two weeks. I am always so impatient when I am waiting on a package in the mail. I often times set it up so that I receive text message notifications on all packages that I order. So you can see where sending off a mail order form is not ideal for me.
LTD Commodities also has a website where you can shop and place orders. I have tried to place orders through the website. The problem with this is that there website is not very organized. You can shop by catalogs. With this option you pick the catalog you would like to view and then start looking for the items that you would like. There are pages and pages that you can go through to look at close to 600 items. This may sound good but there is no system to this. So if you are looking for candles, are you really going to look at over 500 items to find candles? No, probably not. The other option is to search the website with the product item #. So basically you look through the catalog they sent through the mail, you write down the item #, you search for each item # online, you add it to you online cart, and then you checkout. This seems like to much work to me. If I planned on ordering more then just a few times I could see where it could take to much time to place an order. I think I would rather just go to a store and get the items I needed. How could this particular company make it easier for customers to place orders?
