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I have not been shy about my feelings about Dr. Martens shoes and boots on this blog. I have quite a few pair, and even talked about my first pair, a major experience in my teenage years, here on the blog.

I check in on their website pretty regularly to check in and see what’s new, and this week, I ran across a pair of heeled loafers that looked perfect for me.

When I went to purchase these, it was much more aggravating than I expected. I don’t remember this happening before, but I will admit that it has been a long time since I made the purchase directly from DrMartens.com.

The shopping experience is quite good, and I may explore that further at a different time, but for now, I want to address issues I had during checkout.

The cart page is really clean and simple, which I like.

I looked up coupon codes online and went to try them out on this purchase. You can see where I put DMFF in the box, but after I put it in there, a little thinking circle moved in the box, and then disappeared. It apparently isn’t valid, but the site doesn’t tell me that! It seemed broken until I realized that it was showing me in the most minimal way that it was processing the code. I can clearly see the “0.00” off for my promo code, so I’m guessing it isn’t working. However, it is super disappointing that they aren’t telling me that my code is invalid in a much more significant way.

Fail number 2 was that there was something up with the shipping options. I chose my state, that was easy enough, but then, when I used the “delivery” dropdown, it gave me 3 listings for “unverified.” Wth. I ended up going back to the homepage and re-navigating to my cart, and it had pre-populated the free shipping option for my order over $50.

I know I said that this page being clean and simple was great, but a little bit more going on is fine, especially if it is going to make it more user-friendly.

Further into the checkout process, I had issues changing my billing address. It took a minute for me to realize that this was because the checkbox for “my billing address is the same as my shipping address” was below the address fields and I had not scrolled down far enough to see it. I was unable to edit the billing address until I had unchecked the box. This needs to be moved to above the address fields.

Here is my order confirmation. The order confirmation screen was short, so I expected more information in the email. Yet again, I run into the issue of a company not giving me any indication of what their order processing time is, how long I should expect to wait before receiving the tracking information. This is basic stuff people! Even a biggish window of a few days is better than nothing, and I know from experience that many customers think that all companies are running like Amazon and shipping orders within hours. I know this is not the case for many online retailers, and we need to keep everyone’s expectations managed properly.