Yahoo sucks

I have been having fslog.com registered at Yahoo Domains for over 3 years and there hasn’t been any technical problems so far. But when it comes to other things like billing, website interface, customer support, etc., they just piss me off.

The problem all started with the credit card charge for renewing the fslog.com domain. I have setup Yahoo to automatically renew the domain and this has been done without any glitches. The normal charges for domains is $9.95 per year, but today I saw that they had charged $34.95 for a one year renewal.

I decided to email the customer support for an explanation of this and started my search for the usual “Contact Us” link in the website. After searching for the page for a while, I got to this page.

For a minute or two I was worried whether my reading skills were gone – for there were no way to “contact” them. I had to choose something from three list boxes and press a button to be taken to the next page (4 clicks).

I must admit that I should have learnt from the previous page’s experience that there would be nothing useful in the second page too. But I tried to be a bit optimistic in finding an email address where I can plead them to give an explanation and stop making me to click through these numerous pages. I was wrong in expecting such a huge favour to the users from Yahoo. The only thing I found was some phone numbers which asked me to call them at 6AM – 6PM PST. I don’t even know whether that number is toll-free or they will be charging me money for calling the number.

I tried searching through almost all the help pages and had to stop the insanity. I then decided to call them in the night (I am in India).

Before trying to call, I tried to find whether someone else were successful in finding out the email address. I found a person in Yahoo Answers who had the same problem and found one email address (similar to the one in my whois info). I tried emailing to both, but it failed to deliver. Good – Yahoo doesn’t even maintain their own domains and emails properly.

I decided to get the phone number and found that instead of calling them, you can schedule a call for their support team to call. This option magically enables only whent he tech support team is awake. I tried that and got about 30 minutes waiting in the queue. I started to write this post while waiting for the call. I refreshed the page which showed the time left, and I was taken back to the Contact Us page. Again click continue, get to page 2 and click another link to get to actual timer. Rinse and repeat till 30 minutes is over and you get back the old page 2 which asks me to schedule a call from their support team.

I was getting so frustrated with this, that I have started to type really fast and I don’t know how many speling mistakes and grammatical errors are there in this post.

This is why I hate using most of yahoo’s services. Most of their services have the worst user interface and doesn’t have a proper channel for communication. Of course I do like flickr and delicious – but they were acquired and not developed inside Yahoo.

But take Google, they have the most simple user interface (except orkut maybe). They have a help link somewhere near the top and the help page is the best I have seen so far. They have a blog for most of their popular services where people can see what new features have gone into it.

This is a lesson well learnt and now I should start moving all my domains to a better company which doesn’t try to steal money (any suggestions?).

The worst part is that I am yet to find a proper email address for asking about this issue. I hope that someone from Yahoo reads this and instead of just commenting about how wrong I am about yahoo, takes some action to show that Yahoo really cares for their customers.

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