A Story Of A Long-term Technical Snag

Brainstorm with me, people:

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I ran into a long-term technical snag with an e-commerce website (won't name them).

The issue?

I didn't receive a single delivery for a year.

I would place the order. Days later, it would get cancelled automatically.

Initially, I thought it was a one off case.

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But after the 15th failed order in a row, I was convinced there was something wrong.

Did I call support? 100s of times.

The response was the same: "Order is under processing. We have raised the complaint. You will get an update in 24 hours."

I came to a point that it was no longer about my orders.

I just wanted to validate the conspiracy theory in my head: that my account was somehow singled out.

I searched on LI & sent a message to the head of product.

He was super nice. Listened to me patiently & promised to investigate.

Turned out, there was a case of hacked accounts on the site a while back & while flagging bogus accounts, I got sucked in too & my checkout was disabled.

The product head confirmed that there was no way customer support could have figured this out.

Look, I was lucky to get hold of an inside guy.

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But how could have this product enabled users to escalate a non-standard issue like this?

Better error messages?