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I was getting back into paintball and made my first purchase in ten years and decided to give ans a shot, it was a $40 tiny hpa tank that fedex failed to deliver. I contacted ans and told them a truck hadn’t even gone by that day yet the tracking stated “delivered”. They told me something like “tracking says it was delivered, can’t do anything for ya buddy!” I replied by politely saying if they couldn’t do anything at all for me i’d have to take my business elsewhere and I’d be letting folks know what happened at any opportunity I had. They still didn’t care.
I just sell random stuff on eBay sometimes and I’d still never leave a customer to get burned like that. I couldn’t believe it. I can only guess how much losing my business alone has cost them at this point.
If you know exactly what you are looking for and how ANS has it labeled it is "okay" but otherwise if you are looking for a certain item type it sucks. Plus trying to navigate it is not nearly as easy as the old one. I would be willing to bet they will keep it the way it is even though it sucks because they paid money to have it redesigned.
One way i found to make it somewhat usable if i am looking for something specific i look the item up on google and normally they are the top 10 and it makes it easier to go to.
Believe it or not, the current version actually has slightly improved navigation than the initial redesign. It was that bad. When the redesign first hit, it was hard to navigate to the main page without getting 404 errors and my existing bookmark for simply www.ansgear.com was broken. Had to do a Google search for an arbitrary item and then click the link to that item's specific page to even get onto the domain without hitting an error message. My assumption that day was that someone botched a server migration or update or something and the site must've fallen back on some previous design version that wasn't fully supported anymore, which would explain all the broken links and near-impossible navigation.
Turns out that nope, they did this intentionally, and presumably even paid someone to do it. Count my mind as boggled. As I said before, what you see now is actually the fixed version of the redesign. The initial launch version was even worse. Finding paintballs themselves, of all things, was near impossible.
Two simple fixes that would make browsing the site appreciably better immediately: (1) The page should persistently remember the user's preference for how many items to display per page instead of reverting to the default 12 every time the user clicks on something different or uses the back button. (2) Different sizes or colors of the same item should be options in drop-down menus on the item's one page, instead of each size/color variant being listed as a completely separate item. Their system can indeed handle this, as demonstrated by barrels, which have drop-down menus for threading type and length. I don't think these fixes are too much to ask.
The Automag: Not as clumsy or random as an electro. An elegant marker for a more civilised age.
The drop downs are a great idea and would make navigating the site better and easier. It might also be easier on their server. Seems to me the page display should be a cookie item.
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