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Any time saved by ordering online and picking up the order has vanished chasing customer support people to fix something that would have taken a few seconds through their website.
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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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Mildly Infuriating
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It's almost like buying and refunding are two completely different processes that are handled under entirely different protocols by credit processors, and one part working has no bearing on whether or not the other part works.
And I never claimed they don't have different prioritization. I'm just saying that one working doesn't mean the other will also work.
The page may have not loaded because of a failed API call to the credit processor when requesting a refund. Charges and refunds are different API usages, and it's wholly possible that an issue on the processor's side can break pages on a merchant's site. If for some reason Walmart's site can't communicate with Visa/MC/AmEx/whoever and their page isn't configured to handle a specific failure, it will likely go to a default error landing page as a failsafe.
I'm not defending Walmart or anything; just explaining some of the technical reasons a refund page can break. API failures happen even to non-scummy stores, as well.
It didn't even get that far.
This error quite literally came up when I click on the "request a refund" button within my order (where Walmart said I needed to. There should have been another page asking which item(s) I want to refund, and I would imagine ask me for a reason why. That's well before it needs to call an API for credit processing.
In any case, this was mildly infuriating, more for the wasted time on something that should have taken two seconds.
FWIW, I can only hope that Walmart gets notified whenever these end user issues pop up on the website... so they can fix the problem. It's been many hours already, and the page still errors out. Unless they've hired amateurs, this seems excessive. Would it take this long if their payment system was down?
Regardless of how these protocols may be handled, they advise customers to use the refund option within the order screen on the website, which is what I did.
If it's broken, why even direct people there? I wouldn't expect a half-working website from one of the largest retailers on the planet.
Links generally don't know if the service on the other end of the link is up or down at that time. I mean you could have it go out and prefetch the headers but that's a lot of overhead for every link.
"The service" in this context, would simply be another Walmart page. A page which also just happened to be one where I'd start the process of getting money back.
It was not a page to actually process any transactions, but to start the process of requesting a refund.
It's not the first company to "offer self serve" where the action involves taking away revenue and just so happens to never ever work, requiring a call to their support. It's almost as if they know some people will just give up and they can keep the profits.