Web site legal and usability problems

My eldest is in college, and today she asked me to purchase an online textbook from cengagebrain.com. There were several interesting things about this site...

1. At the bottom of the purchasing page there was a link to their terms and conditions - all 8188 words of it! That works out to 260 words per dollar spent. Can you believe it - having to study an 8188 word purchase contract before you buy a digital textbook? Something is not quite right here, especially when the first assignment was due at midnight tomorrow.
2. The last term on the contract stated that they had the right to deny you access to your account at their sole discretion for any reason what so ever. Wow - so I am paying for this access, and if they are in a bad mood tomorrow, they can just turn off my access. I have no recourse at all.
3. Paying for the text book required my credit cards. When entering the credit card number I had to take care to strip out all spaces and dashes - enter numbers only. This is a pet usability peeve of mine - it doesn't take much JavaScript to strip those things out, but no, you the user, must do the work. But if you type one of those 16 digits incorrectly and there are no spaces in the 16 numbers, it can be difficult to find the error. I am never sure if this is just poor UI design, or lazy programmers, but you so often see it on web sites. My rule of thumb is that if the system can do the work, the then user should not have to do it.
4. The credit card expiry date month defaulted to August, but my expiry month for this card is earlier in the year. So when I changed the month I got an error, because the expiry date was now earlier than today (I had not yet set the year field). But the year field is to the right of the month field; naturally you enter the month first. This is an example of poor web site design, but something that can so easily slip past the people developing the web site, and their quality department. These sort of things really take away for the "quality" of the user experience.

It was quite interesting to come up with so many problems with so little interaction on a web site. This is a good example of why work flow, web site & software development really are so hard to get right.