How many passwords to you need to buy a Daily Deal?

Like many, I subscribe to daily notification emails about Daily Deals and I suspect that like most people I ignore them a lot of the time. But today was different: I noticed one that caught my eye.

It was for a restaurant in Cardiff, one I’d had some great nights in and one I’d not been to for many, many months, so I thought I’d buy the Deal.

Having read the email, I clicked the right button only to be asked for my email address as the deal was “only available to members”. Hang-on boio! You sent me the invite because I am a “Member” (careful how you read that!). So why do you want me to log in again?

Anyway, being a compliant soul I logged in, using my email address, after all that’s how they contacted me in the first place, but I was nearly sent to the naughty corner. “You logged in with Facebook last time” or something like it was the message. So what? This time I’m logging in without Facebook, it’s my choice, my account, my name.

Wrong: it’s their rules and therefore to log in I had to create a new password. Damned if I know why. But eventually we got there. And I wanted to buy, I really did, but I was asked for another password, well probably the same password but you know what I mean. So I didn’t buy. I gave up.

This is not the way that online media is supposed to work. It’s supposed to flow, it’s meant to be light touch, it’s meant to let me buy with ease. This time it was none of these and I gave up. There was probably a reason why I’d not been to the restaurant for a while and I don’t think price reduction as part of a Daily Deal would have got over it.