Exclusive Books online: Is it worth bookmarking?

I greeted the news of Exclusive Books` online foray with great enthusiasm. What better way to expand the business and make customers even happier than before, right? Wrong! The Exclusive Books Web site is more likely to drive you up the wall in frustration than have you leaping for your credit and Fanatics cards in gleeful anticipation. Here`s why.

The site is slightly above average in appearance - good use of colours and layout make it appealing. Of course, just as you can never judge a book by its cover, so too is it impossible to measure the worth of a Web site by its home page alone.

As you soon learn, the Exclusive Books (EB) Web site is a quagmire of broken links and dead ends. The most noticeable omission is that of a registration option. You can manage your account, check your shopping basket, even sign if you`re already a customer - but there`s no way to get onto the EB database unless you actually make a purchase.

Try browsing the site`s offerings by category, and you may end up yanking your hair out at the roots - or wishing you could do the same to the Webmaster. Almost all the links I clicked on were broken - but instead of receiving error messages, I was sent to utterly blank pages, faced only with a smug little "Done" in the browser status bar below.

Speaking of categories, I found it strange that while EB`s brick and mortar branches feature a broad category encompassing religion, and therefore called "Religion", the Web site has only one obviously religion-oriented category devoted entirely to Christianity.

A search for other major religions of the world yielded zero results for the keywords "Islam", "Judaism" and "Buddhism". Further browsing revealed that all of these topics are covered in the Eastern Thought category - surely then Christianity should fall under Middle Eastern Thought?

And for some unfathomable reason, the entire site beyond the home page is 40-bit SSL secured. Go figure.

The site is seemingly easily navigated - I almost rejoiced in this one aspect which was apparently in working order - until of course, I met up with a very solid brick wall. In the process of making a purchase, I decided to follow the proffered link to "more about shopping at Exclusive Books online". And of course, there was no link back to my order page - as they say in the classics: ARGH!

Although I found more broken links than I thought possible on one site, those in working order took me through to some interesting content. For example, I discovered the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, which pays tribute to a group of fantasy writers known as The Inklings, who assembled at Oxford University in the early part of this century as a discussion and writing group.

Two notable members of the group were CS Lewis and the grandfather of all modern fantasy, JRR Tolkien. The awards are presented to works written "in the spirit of the Inklings", and a range of these are featured on this page. There are other categories of award-winning novels featured as well, such as Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning efforts - just so you know you`re getting the cream of the crop.

It`s almost unavoidable for any online bookstore to be compared to the big daddy of online bookstores - Amazon.com. There were so many broken links in the various categories featured at EB, it was hard to select a title at random. So I tried to select a novel by one of my favourite authors, Terry Pratchett. That didn`t work either, since EB`s search engine doesn`t work.

Finally, I found "Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years", in which Adrian Mole returns as a thirtysomething, poking his nose into computers, cyberspace and the millennium. The book is also available at Amazon.co.uk - it is in fact number two on that site`s bestseller list.

And this is where the true litmus test begins. Firstly, the EB page hasn`t been updated since it first listed the book as "to be published on 14 October 1999".

At EB, the book retails online for R122.76. Surprisingly (or maybe not, for the less optimistic South African consumer) the book is actually more expensive on the Web site than it would be at a brick-and-mortar EB.

At least, that`s how it appears - I phoned the Sandton and Eastgate EB branches for corroboration and received differing figures all around. Whereas the Web site offers this book at R127.76, the Eastgate branch has the same product for R142 and the Sandton one for a mere R102. In addition, having the book shipped directly to my post box costs R25, which brings the total cost to R147.76 - and it would take three to four weeks to dispatch.

At Amazon.co.uk, the book priced at lb7.35, and is marked down from the list price of lb14.99 (what it reckons to be a 50% saving). Delivery charges bring the total cost to lb13.30 - which makes buying this item from the UK about R14.76 cheaper than buying it locally - AND it`s available within 24 hours.

In addition, EB`s shipping costs seem phenomenal - having items delivered to your post office will cost you R25 per single item, with an additional R12 added for each other item. Delivery to your door costs R45 per single item, and R12 for each additional item.

To my mind, EB is perfectly poised to take the South African online book market by storm - if it could just get it right!

The point of online shopping is that it is generally cheaper all around - a definite win-win situation. If EB could grasp this concept and tailor its online product to this essential e-commerce requirement, it could stand the chance of snaring a few South African customers back from the Amazon.com/co.uk market. Until then, I`ll stick to the jungle for my online book shopping.

At the time of publishing this review, ITWeb heard that the Exclusive Books site has been taken down for renovation.