Shopping with Constraints.

I know some people shop for fun. I usually only shop when I need something. And whether it’s an appliance or clothing or food or almost anything, it usually has some constraints attached other than price. For whatever reason, the various shopping sites don’t seem to understand how shopping works.

Let’s say you need to buy a new appliance for your kitchen. Your kitchen exists in a three dimensional world, so it has limited space. Your new appliance needs to fit somewhere. Most sites will help with that: they list the dimensions! But they have those fancy interfaces for filtering products, and they don’t let you filter by dimensions!

I do sympathize that trying to deal with so many products and so many customers creates a lot of friction for a well-designed store. But I also know that’s literally what they are in the business of, so you’d think that lowering that friction would be a focus, a priority, something that they would ever chase.

Let’s say you want to buy window screens. Those things get made for particular sizes and to fit just-so, and the websites have you specify the exact frame you want. That’s great! More shopping should be like window screens. The same goes for clothing. If it doesn’t fit, it’s not something the customer can want, so most sites try to let customers filter by size while they browse.

Another example going the other way is containers for dry pet food and bags of dry pet food. If you do a little research, it will tell you that you should store dry dog food and dry cat food in their original bags. But if you do some research you’ll also know that having another container is not a bad idea. Having a container around the container can make it more convenient, can reduce problems if the bag tears or spills.

What you want to do is to put the opened bag (closed up either using a crimp or a built-in reseal on the bag) inside the bigger container that’s mostly air-tight.

But when you shop for dry pet food containers, all of those suckers show pictures of the food being poured in without the original bag. And while they list volumes, most don’t mention interior dimensions of the container. Worse, the pet food companies don’t tell you how much physical space the full bag takes up (in dimensions). So you’re shopping for a combination of two things without knowing what will fit the other.

What bothers almost as much as the lack of information, is that it wouldn’t be much work to put the information out. They have the information. The manufacturers have it, but the vendors have it too! They have to know how to fit these products into cardboard for shipping. They know, but they don’t tell you.

So if you work for a vendor, take another pass. What information do you have, it wouldn’t cost you much to add, that your customer might need to know? And if you include it already, can they dependably filter for that? Shopping is a culling activity, going from the entire universe of available products to the ones the customer needs. If the customer has constraints, that universe can be shrunk much faster if the vendor lets it.