Planning for failure
Most of the e-commerce sites upon errors generate some cryptic self-exonerating error messages such as “Oops, something unexpected happened, come back soon” or “Error C333. Please describe in detail what you were doing, and what you were wearing, and send it over to our technical team for further investigation”. Not Pottery Barn, which seems to plan ahead for failures. Whether it’s shrewd planning, or an ordering system that consistently screws up, Pottery Barn has a separate notification system in place for the cases when you tried to buy something off their site, and failed at checkout.
