Recently I found a document from ages ago where I'd made a note that my daughter would love a 1kg bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk. I thought that it would make a good Christmas present so I decided to try and find one.
A quick Google later told me that although this product has existed in the past, it's rare if not impossible to find at the moment. Perhaps it's a seasonal thing but one website did turn up a result – a website called DebenhamsWeddings.com and not only that, they show that the price has fallen from £10 to only £3 – result!
The problem is that the only action that's available on the page is "Add to gift list" which I didn't want to do – I wanted to buy it so I rang the customer services number which is where it started to get a bit weird.
I explained my problem to the lady who answered the phone and she said "yes, sometimes Google show pages for products that are no longer available". She took the product number from me and looked it up and sure enough – this product was no longer available.
I said "why wouldn't your web team update the page to say that this product isn't available" and she completely failed to see that it is totally Debenhams fault and said "no, it's Google linking to the page that's the problem. You shouldn't use Google to search for products on our website" – erm HELLO...what sort of moronic response is that?
Honest to god – if Debenhams leave a live page on the internet that shows a product as available then it's not Google's fault because nobody (including Google) can tell that this product isn't available any more. The fact that she gave me a response without any hesitation shows that this obviously happens reasonably frequently.
It just goes to show how dumb some company's attitudes to the web are which is quite scary. Thankfully, it does make it far easier for retailers who have a clue about what they're doing to take business away from idiots that haven't a clue.
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