I got excited about Google’s new product Chromecast and quickly placed an order on the Google Play store. They said “will ship by August 2”; plenty of time to cancel the order if I found it elsewhere for cheaper or sooner. And so I did on Amazon; same price, delivers today for free. Yay!

Only there’s no way to cancel a Google Play store order. I see my order, Status “Pending”. I click “Cancel” and I’m told “We could not cancel your order at this time. Please try again later” with a link to this support page which says “it has already been packed”. Only without any promised delivery date, so I’m assuming it’s still weeks away.

Google has a decent phone support option. The nice American lady told me that there was no way to cancel the order and my best option was to refuse delivery. Except the package is being delivered at an unknown future date with instructions to leave without a signature. She had no explanation for why it was impossible to cancel an order that had not yet been billed or shipped. To be fair to Google I vaguely remember seeing a warning when I purchased saying “you may not be able to cancel this order”. Frankly, I ignored that, it seemed so improbable. Next time I just won’t order from Google Play.

Order fulfillment is hard. Google’s not making enough money on $35 hardware sales to be worth doing a good job of it. So why are they even trying? I guess it’s to compete with Apple. But they should consider how good the experience is buying hardware online from Apple.