www.netmarket.com
I recently bought Cendant shares at 19 and change, and again
twice in the low twenties. I plan to hold this a good long time.
The combination of the brand-name franchises and the Internet
businesses at current price levels is a bargain. As for the accounting issues, relatively speaking it is a blip. They seem to be taking the high road in terms of dealing with it.
That's the good news. Here's some not so good, I think. Taking Peter Lynch's dictum in mind about knowing what you own - and as a professional Web developer - I decided to try to use CUC's flagship Web site to actually buy some things. If anyone else on the thread wants to try this, the URL is netmarket.com.
By the looks of things, they are trying to be a kind of online Costco or Target, a good concept, I think, and one they may have critical mass for. We lined up a shopping cart full of things for our baby, including a lot of formula at a lower price than either Costco or Target. (Fedex shipping for orders over $50 is $4.99 for the whole shooting match.) But execution of the whole thing was awful. There are some obvious technology and structural issues this company still has to deal with. For one thing, this is an amalgam of sites rather
than a single site, and apparently you have to create a log-in identity for each sub-site you visit. Our first pass through the site, it generated many programming error messages, and wouldn't take our order. Eventually, we had to abandon or shopping cart full of merchandise (a retailer's nightmare - the will customer who is forced to walk away at check out - Amazon.com not). I called the customer service number on the screen, and got an extremely irritating voice mail message promising to call back (they never did). Out of sheer stubbornness, I also e-mailed customer service, CCing Walter Forbes.
This e-mail did generate a response, from a presumambly young man on the phone who combined an incredible level of unctousness (think of the INS sidekick in the movie "Coneheads") with an absolutely appalling level of ignorance. He claimed that my problem was caused by using Microsoft Explorer 4.01, while the CUC sites had been written for Netscape. To make a long story short, this is a bogus claim. But I did figure out how to get the site to work, and order a bunch of baby stuff. If there is a problem with the delivery, I will report it here.
In the meantime, I would have to rate this company's Internet effort as A+ for concept, A- for potential critical mass needed to carry it off, D for technology (live by technology, die by technology), C- for usability, C- for employee caliber: an overall maybe. I think part of the problem is that they are used to dealing with proprietary gateways such as AOL rather than public Web sites.
Thread, check it out for yourselves - you should know what you are owning.
HD |
