Target's online experience is way off target!

Full Review
Once a year I have to try online shopping at Target to remember why I try to avoid it. Terrible experience.

A few years ago, I held a gift drive for a charity and used Target for the online wish list/registry. It was a nightmare. Some items were delivered, others were not. S&H was overpriced. Some were back-ordered but the viewer could not tell and I didn't receive any updates from them - so some gifts  took 3-6 months to fill. So I scratched Target off the charity drive list & switched to Amazon with no regrets whatsoever.

Recently, I made an online order for some tops from Target - the shirts were poorly sized (about 2 sizes too small), so I returned them & got a pain-in-the-@ss e-giftcard as a refund. When you pay with paypal, they will not refund your paypal account - this is indicated on the site, in very small easy to overlook typeface.

I called customer service a few times - each time, I had a poor, static-filled phone connection & spoke with someone with poor english. For example, I had to spell my first name (Carol) four times. I was disconnected by them twice. They read from a script & did not use American phrases. Clearly Target has downgraded their call center operations to save $$$.

So I went online & decided to spend my $60 egift card to order some basic toiletries, so I could be done with Target. It took me almost an hour -- first, it wouldn't accept my login/password & that took 3 calls to customer service & a password change. Then it wouldn't accept my egift card number about 5-6 times, so I had to keep trying to plug it in over & over again - this took another 2 calls to customer service. All in all, the transacation took about an hour.

There's a big red banner on their site advertising free shipping. This is misleading - it's only for target credit card holders. My shipping & handling was a whopping $15 for less than $60 of product - so it adds 25% to my order. Macy's, Zappos & other companies offer free S&H so I will definitely visit other sites for my online shopping next time around.

The funtionality and overall user experience of the site is poor. When you put your mouse over the shopping cart visual, other drop-downs appear & it takes a couple tries to get into your shopping cart. When you do a search & check off the "online" sorting options, it doesn't sort properly - so you often get lists of items that are not available online. My screen kept freezing- I had to reinsert the payment information several times - time consuming & frustrating.

In fact, their online product offerings are limited. I wanted to order a bunch of holiday gifts & other items, and discovered that most of them were only available in the store. So, I'm going with Amazon and free super saver shipping!