It’s important to show customers that you will ‘deliver’ the best services from all aspects of your business. From buying the product to contacting the company during the use of the product to purchasing more products from the company. As a customer, I expect the best if I give a company my money – and why shouldn’t I?
This week I ordered a few laptops for work. Granted, they are not both for me to use, but it’s been interesting ordering them and comparing the whole process or researching, finding, ordering, etc. I’ll throw up a few screenshots in this. But first, I wanted to point out the different shipping dates for each laptop.
Laptop #1 ordered on April 28th: MacBook Pro ordered through the Apple Store online.

Laptop #2 ordered April 30th: Dell Laptop ordered through Dell.com
So, the Mac is set to arrive on Tuesday – the Dell on May 19. I’m sure that Dell has a lot of orders being a top PC maker, but I’m surprised though, as big as Dell is, that it takes that long to assemble and ship a standard laptop for basic use. Maybe it’s the whole production process that Dell uses compared to what Apple uses? Are they both ‘made-to-order’?
One other thing I noticed are how drastically different the websites were. I’ve noticed this for years now as I order computers for work, etc. One thing I really like about the Apple order process is how simple and clean it looks. Here’s a screen shot giving you the choices of laptops you can select from from Apple. Notice how simple it is. Only the facts, specs, and prices. That’s all I’m looking for.

And here is the Dell selection. Notice the use of many ‘!’ They must be really excited about all that hard drive space. Then they give you the ‘Instant Savings’ and use many font colors for features. And, I’m personally not a huge fan of the star rating system – their products should be good without customer rankings involved.

Now for the building process. At apple you pretty much scroll down a single page, select your options, click ‘Add to Cart’ and your through. Once again, very simple, clean, just the facts and choices. No ‘Limted Time Offers!’ or ‘Get your 30-day trial!’ Here you go:

And back to Dell. Instead of scrolling through a single page, you click through about 12-15 pages of each option. You can switch to a ‘List View’ if you want which is good – but in a design perspective you’re scrolling within windows (frames) which just sort of looks bad to me. Granted, most of it is pretty easy to know what options you want, but some of it can be a little too much. And why does it cost more to have certain colors for a laptop? Below is a a screen shot to select your processor – looks a little busy.

The checkout process for both are about the same. This just made me realize how much I enjoy a simple, clean website. Easy to navigate, research, find what you’re looking for, purchase and check-out.
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