Under the covers
The companies, technologies and ideas that power the web.
Wednesday 7 March 2007, 7:18 AM
Infinite choice=overwhelming confusion
Following on from my previous post, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at retail sites over the last few weeks and it struck me that they have the ultimate overwhelming choice problem.
What’s really interesting is how poor most of them are when it comes to filtering the products they sell in a way that is meaningful to the user. Even the market leaders are way behind the price comparison engines like shopping.com and pricegrabber. There is a lot we can learn from these guys who live and die by getting the user to an affiliate as fast as possible.
In retail that means making an on-line sale, in publishing it could mean downloading a whitepaper, watching a video or reading a review. So what does it take to create great filters? The answer is simple, anything the user will recognise is a great filter. Here are my top 5
1. Brands - some users will buy brands way above all other criteria
2. Price - likewise some users will buy based on price rather than quality
3. Editorial recommendation - the trusted third party
4. User recommendations/ratings - 62% of people trust their peers more than anybody else
5. Automated recommendations - “users who bought this, also bought that”
Obvious common sense stuff, so why aren’t more retailers/publishers doing this? Two reasons, firstly, you can’t do comparisons if your data is dirty and most big databases of content or products are very messy. Secondly, tying user opinions/ratings to that content is not always straightforward. Integration between E-Commerce systems and Content Management Systems is usually pretty light resulting in disconnected data.
What the price comparison engines have invested in is great data tools so that their databases are as clean as possible. This lets them create all manner of filters , safe in the knowledge that the results will be right. It’s time for the rest of the on-line world to take that on board as the volumes of content increase exponentially otherwise overwhelming confusion will reign.
PreviousComments on this post
One of my bugbears with online stores is the fact they often list products that are out of stock or are being sold by 3rd parties via that store.
While these are great features allowing customers to see other products in a search result its often very annoying and can lead to business going else were as a search could yield 10+ pages of searchs to manually work through.
A prime example of this is Amazon (co.uk) who allow you to sort search results, yet they still haven't managed to give users methods to toogle the following
'Exclude Out of stock items'
'Exclude Amazon Shop items'
'Only show Amazon Shops if Out of stock on Amazon'
I can't see this as being a massive alteration to the why they feature items, and could easily enable customers to find what theya re looking for much quicker.
i think so that reason alone Amazon fall into the Infinite choice=overwhelming confusion arena.
Good point, I actually experienced this recently on Amazon when I wanted to combine two orders to save on the postage. I hadn't even realised that one item was being supplied by a third party and ended up paying £4 postage for a £5 item because they couldn't be combined.
On a related note, I remember hearing Google VP of engineering Urs Holzle talking about commercial results on Google searches.
One big area of complaints for Google, he said, was connected to the growing prominence of commercial search results -- in particular price comparison engines and e-commerce sites. "We have thought of having a button saying 'give me less commercial results". Well, obviously they haven't. Could this be a sign of Google's technology suffering due to bad business decisions? I had hope that this company would be immune to such things.
