Why the f**k is buying this so difficult?!

The story of the £145 that tonies almost didn't earn from me, despite being a fan.

Tonies UK

I'm a new fan of tonies. So many things to like! But their online checkout just wasted a lot of my time.

I live in Germany. The company behind tonies, I found out, is also based in Germany. So far so good.

But I quickly found out that they only offer 14 tonies in the English language on their German (DE) web store. A quick look at their United Kingdom (UK) web store shows 160+ tonies available. That’s 11 times more titles.

I suppose this discrepancy has to do with the company’s ability to secure the rights to sell English stories in the German market. Fine. This is something I'm willing to accept. Business law is hard.

Anyway, fancying myself as a tech and business savvy consumer, I decided to go to their UK store to buy the tonies and have them shipped to a friend. I knew my daughter would love them, so I was determined to get them in this convoluted way.

On the UK store, I see a "4 for 3" sale. NICE! I was very happy. In 30 minutes, I added 12 tonies to the cart. I was in “Shut up and take my money!!!” mode. I haven’t felt this happy adding shit to cart in a while.

Each tonie, by the way, costs £14.99. So that meant I should save 14.99 x 3 = around £45. Sweet!

But then... nope.

Inspecting my cart at checkout, I noticed that the "4 for 3" offer was not applied at all. I was expecting it to apply 3 times!

What do you normally do in a situation like this? You start asking all kinds of questions to yourself, right? I asked myself:

• Will the discounts apply if I remove all but 4 items?

• Does the offer apply to every multiple of 4 items? Or is it just applicable once per checkout?

• What happens if one or more item is already discounted? Will the offer no longer apply, or will it still apply and the lowest priced item becomes free?

• Is there a bug in their offer implementation? Did the developers misunderstand the business specifications for this kind of offers?

I was getting frustrated. Frankly, there’s a good chance that I would have walked away by now if I wasn't hopelessly into their product (for my daughter’s sake).

So I started to do trial and error on their checkout process… what worked in the end was checking out 3 times, each with 4 items. That was how I managed to save £45 as I was originally led to believe I would save with the offer. I wasted 20 minutes on this.

If I were richer, and £45 were inconsequential, I may have just checked out and saved my 20 minutes. But even then, from a business and software development point of view, I’d still have the following to say:

• Always create an Offer landing page to specify what the rules are. There are always rules because commerce is complex. It’s going to reduce a lot of customer frustration.

• The Offer landing page copy will serve as a definitive reference for the software engineers who implemented the offer in code.

• It doesn’t make business sense to quietly hope that consumers are stupid enough to pay full price by using a dark pattern like forcing them to have to split their checkout into 3 parts in order to get a discount applied 3 times. You’re going to end up with angry customers, overworked logistics workers, and confused data analysts. And you’ll still end up with most customers taking the long route to save money, removing any meaningful gain in profits you were expecting.

• Understand commerce! Don’t restrict the Billing address’s country list. I had to do some gymnastics with my Wise account to create a GBP account with an associated UK address to bypass that problem. It is perfectly legal to buy something on a UK store and pay using a German debit card (which has a German billing address) and have it shipped to an address in the UK.

Okay? Okay…

I think the biggest takeaway here for businesses like tonies is this: Do not ever, EVER, make the customer wonder, “Why the f**k is buying this so difficult?!” Every single customer must checkout to get your product, so if you mess up there, the lost profits are clearly going to be massive.

(Unless, I suppose, you’re Rolex or Hermes, where waiting is — laughs nervously — explicitly designed to be part of the perceived value.)

I leave you with a photo of my daughter putting a tonie onto her tonie box. I am seriously in love with the concept and execution of the product. Such ingenuity to bring stories into the physical realm with figurines that children love and that give them control!