Gateway
3 clicks to start the buying process.
Selection / Customization process
Product Clarity: Low.
Price Clarity: Good. Components priced relatively.
Speed: Slow. Graphics-heavy, complex pages took a while to load (and it’s their server that’s the problem, not UMass’s ethernet!)
Range / Power: Moderate.
Notes
Gateway has the same more or less inane division into Home & Home Office, Small & Mid-Sized Businesses, Large Businesses, Government, Education, (... and Accessories) as all the other big-name PC sites, including the bifurcation of another method of entrance at Desktops, Notebooks, etc.
Not quite enough product information is provided. The model names are just numbers, and although the specifications are there description or explanation is not.
The now familiar “customization”: a few choices each (two, three, or four options) for processor, hard drive, case, etc. Gateway has more choice for the monitor. Then comes a whole page of recommended peripherals (mostly printers). Last is a page devoted to a confusing array of deals on software packages. All of this is in the plus/minus $x format.
Clicking the “add to cart” button brought up an annoying last-minute pop-up ad pushing a handful of accessories.
In short, Gateway does not provide enough guidance on selecting a computer and is slower, more awkward, and more annoying in the customization and buying process.
Problems
- Most pages are slow loading.
- The loading of some product-line pages hung, with the page not displayed, due to a request the page was making to intel.com for some reason.
- None of their product customization pages worked in the (standards-compliant) Opera browser. The link loaded (and automatically reloaded) hundreds of kilobytes and then displayed absolute whiteness.
- Gateway’s pages do not shrink to fit smaller browser windows: horizontal scrolling was required if a sidebar on the browser was open, for instance.
Good Features
- “Starting at” pricing information is provided freely and clearly.
- The specifications pages were clean and were only two “clicks” (links) deep into the site.