Barnes & Noble dot com Woes

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Barnes & Noble dot com Woes
By changing a minor item in my profile, I've managed to erase all of my history with Barnes & Noble. How Interesting.

BarnesAndNoble.com. I remember visiting years ago when it was a boring corporate site. I'd visit to see the list of readings, which was never updated. Now it's a full fledged e-commerce site, and only somewhat related to the Barnes & Noble bookstores.

You can buy books online and return them at the store, and return them at the store. If you return a book to the store, and you don't have the receipt, they give you the lowest available price - the BN.com price. Another nifty thing is that if you live in Manhattan and they have an item in stock, they'll get it to you the same day. I neither work nor live in Manhattan, so I have to wait with everyone else.

I purchase books from them because of this generous return policy. It's much easier to return a book I don't like to a store than to ship it back to Amazon.com, so I do this for items I'm not sure I'll want to keep. I buy a lot of books and many of them don't get read. These go back to the store. Usually I ask the store to order obscure books for me and I pick them up, but a few times I've purchased them via BarnesAndNoble.com.

Well, I purchased a few books from bn.com recently. I'd only done so once or twice before, usually I just order the book to a store and pick it up. The process itself went smoothly enough and the two books that were available shipped immediately and I got them in a matter of days. They promised they would ship by June 26th, and they shipped on June 26th... At 11:31pm... The two books that weren't in stock shipped a few days later. I haven't received them yet, but according to the courier, they're en route from my local post office.

Since I don't use my hotmail.com account anymore, I changed my e-mail address with BN.com. Since this is also your login ID, it's important that you remember what e-mail address you use. They don't require a second step confirmation where you respond to some e-mail they send to you though, you can just change it to anything you wish.

I signed in today to check on the status of the latest shipment and learned that I had never ordered anything from them. There were no orders being processed and no orders had shipped! Of course, this is untrue, I just ordered four books from them, and two of them I've already received.

Since the only thing I'd changed recently was my e-mail address, which is also your login, I decided that this is why my information wasn't avaiable. So I changed it back, and low and behold, my order history returned to me. I guess this information is tied in with your e-mail address and if you change that, well, you lose your history with their website.

This is completely rediculous and one of the worst examples of unusability I've ever seen. It also makes me wonder whether or not someone can change their e-mail address to my old address and gain access to my prior account history. This is something I'll be experimenting with in days to come... Stay tuned for more information.