If the chatter on the web is anything to go by, many customers have been disappointed by the process put in place by O2 for pre-registered customers to get their hands on the new 3G iPhone.

According to many online reports, O2’s site crashed within an hour of the 3G phone becoming available to pre-registered customers.

In a statement, O2 admitted: “Although O2 had invested several million pounds to increase the order capacity of the site (with order-processing capacity increased by more than 250 times its normal rate), at times the site still couldn’t process the sheer weight of demand.”

The online store sold out of its stock allocation within a few hours of the site going live.

Carphone Warehouse's pre-order stocks also ran dry and its site now tells customers to come back on July 11 – when the phone will also become available in stores.

Meanwhile, O2 said that customers should return to its site on July 10 for more information (although it does not say that more phones will be available on the site then).

So customers who are desperate to get their hands on the device – and, despite the consumer downturn, there seem to be many – have the choice of risking the next scrum online or taking their chance at the scrum at an O2 or Carphone Warehouse store on Friday morning.

The web works at its best as a sales channel – or part of a sales channel – when it improves upon the in-store experience; when a product can be sourced more quickly or more cheaply than from the high street or when a customer reserves a product online, which they know will be waiting for them when they arrive at a store.

But in this case that hasn’t happened. Customers’ expectations have been raised online through the pre-registration process and then dashed when they have logged on to find the site down and stocks run dry.

Technology often gets the blame when an online experience is poor, but in this instance it seems that infrastructure provisions were made – the issue is actually one of customer service.

If you invited customers to your store and then staff ignored them when they arrived, you wouldn’t expect them to come back. If retailers want customers to keep returning to their sites, they must move forward from their first-generation customer service.

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