Now that’s customer service

Netflix doesn’t let customers sign in on the front page, which is the most absurd, ridiculous design decision they could possibly make: they have a default no-cookies-detected home page which includes fields *with which you can register* but if you’re a returning customer there’s absolutely no way to sign in there. You have to click “login” each time, get a new page to render, then submit.

I can’t think of another large-scale ecommerce site that makes this so difficult, and certainly not one that, like Netflix, you have to return to continually.

But let’s say you want to drop them a line and say “look, instead of having the login page render on a second page, even if for some reason you don’t want to immediately draw one, why not just have the “login” link create a small box where you can enter your name/password, like many other sites do?”

Nope.

Contact Us” has no contact information.

The Help Center supposedly offers ways to contact them, but you can’t actually send them an email: there weirdly is a “Answers by Phone” box when you dead-end, but there’s never any contact information besides that. So I have to call someone, wait on hold, and then talk to someone? Why? And running a call center is expensive — it’s far easier to do something useful with email feedback.

There’s a host of stuff like this — they recently made it impossible for not discernible reason to browse some things in the same way you used to be able to

It’s amazing that Netflix somehow managed to create a help system more difficult and frustrating to use than eBay’s. Congratulations, Netflix. That must have taken some doing.