DO YOU WANT TO SELL ME SOMETHING OR NOT?

High end video suppliers, you would have thought, would be the most courteous people around. Why? Well, they do after all sell the creme de la creme of video products. Products which cost the earth for even the smallest part. Lets take matte boxes as a good example of an essential piece of equipment. They block out undue light thereby helping to increase the saturation of colours in the picture, and they enable many high quality filters to be combined in front of the lens. Such things are quite heavy however and as a result take their toll on the join between the lens and camera body on a full size ENG camera.

Therefore I decided to buy myself a rail support system for the matte box. You would have thought that this would be a simple matter. After all most matte box manufacturers sell their rail support systems seperately from the matte box itself. Lord forbid that anybody actually gives a good deal on the whole package. I tell a lie. Cavision do offer a nice combination package, but they still suffer from the problems I am about to take issue with. This affects many different pieces of high end equipment.

In the modern age of the internet I want to order my equipment yesterday. I want to do a search on Google for the equipment that I want, and then I want to visit the website, get all the info I need, and then place an order. Obviously for really expensive stuff such as a camera I would really want to see it in person first. However for smaller accessories, if I have done my reaearch, I just want to order online. No hassles.

I am absolutely amazed however at how many video and film equipment resellers do not have online ordering, do not in many cases even list the prices, do not have clickable information about the products, and seem to have some of the worst web page design in history. Okay, I admit I'm not exactly Mr Website Designer Of The Year, but then again I did make an effort to make my site as accessible and as fast loading as possible without making it look like a 5 year old had designed it. The same cannot be said for many video and film equipment resellers sites.

Here are a few of my biggest pet hates of many resellers sites;

• Doesn't list the prices.
• Doesn't allow online ordering.
• Doesn't have product information.
• Doesn't bother to reply when they are emailed a question.
• Links directly to the manufacturers website when you think you are clicking for product info.

The latter pet peeve has me fuming the most of all. Lets use Vocas as an example. I went to their site to find resellers of their products around the world. The Vocas site itself is very informative, and it allows the user to select the country that they live in and find a reseller. Unfortunately most of these resellers need a good lesson in website design, and unfortunately many of them do not actually seem to be resellers at all! Almost 50% of them don't list products, and if they do they don't mention Vocas!

What made me even more mad was that in some cases I had clicked on a link from Vocas, looked around the reseller website it had taken me to, only to click on the Vocas matte box of that site - thinking that it was going to tell me the price and give me a chance to order - only to have the Vocas official site open up in an entirely new window! Fantastic. So what exactly was the point of the reseller doing this? I wanted a Vocas product so I went to their site. The last thing I want, or need, is to be taken straight back again.

Not listing prices is another one of my worst peeves. Being high end companies they may think that they are seperating the serious people from the not so serious. Well, to those companies that think this I have news for them. If I go to your website and you don't show me the price I'll go to a website that does instead. Its that simple. If you make your website difficult, or make ordering a product a chore by having to ring you or email you first, I'll go elsewhere.

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