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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Just allow me to filter your entire stock list by size. No one does this.

"OMG, this shirt is awesome" followed by "Damn it, it's out of stock", after opening it and has M (Medium) greyed out.

Disappointment pattern, I call it.

That bugs me less than being able to exclude features that I don't want, especially popular ones. I can not think of a single store that allows me to exclude things using the same set of filters.

For example, let's say I want bluetooth-less headphones. Simply selecting "wired" isn't enough as it will show me headphones that support both wired and wireless capabilities. Sometimes I don't want a feature, even a popular one, and it's extremely tedious to wade through results of stuff I will never want.

I want this feature as badly as you do. In my case, to filter out any smart TVs when shopping for a replacement television. I recognize though, from working in retail and from looking at the front and back ends of the human process (and the front and back ends of POS, ERM, and other software that manages a business' inventory)... That the world itself will probably never be well ordered enough to support reliable logical operators with accurate results when searching most inventory out there.

You have to nail the software that developers have to write to understand the inventory it's keeping well enough for those operators to work. You have to nail the human process of keeping the inventory itself (and any tagging/categorization in the software) manually up to date. You have to deal with the malincentives of all the people selling product on to you at the distributor level, and how that affects the information they provide with the product.

I wish for consistent, comprehensive logical operators in product search but I just don't see it happening. I think it's an example of a 'wicked problem'[1], and one that someone could probably make a killing solving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

This is not an uncommon feature. The word I have used for this is 'facets' (unsure if its correct or not). Look at Gap.com for an example. For example click on "Men > Shop All Styles" then click whatever 'facet' you want on the left.

Of note I was part of the team that helped build this feature over 10 years ago.

In some markets this is called "parametric search".

Digikey and McMaster-Carr are the kings of this.

Ah, Digikey is excellent. I've used McMaster-Carr for a while as a reference model when I'm writing catalogue/search UIs, nice to have another one to hand.

The product database behind Digikey is much larger but the metadata of lower quality than McMaster. It means that filtering can be very frustrating if the parameter you’re filtering on has entries for, say,

    1 in
    1.0”
    25.4mm
    1”
    1lpi

Another example: If you’re buying something like a cable, they have a parameter for “end 1” and “end 2” with each product making an arbitrary choice about which end is which.

I guess my point is that the taxonomy and cleanliness of the product database is just as important as the front-end UI

Oh definitely. In terms of reference model what I'm looking at is how easy it is use that exposed taxonomy, how fast it is, etc. I can only make inferences about the taxonomies from that (though the quality of the search gives extremely strong indications as to how the data is structured).

The example you give is really good though. It is an indication how well structured/clean the metadata is, and it's something that should be dealt with, even if it's not at the metadata level -- ie some kind of sanitisation/formatting layer just behind the UI layer which parses sizes/weights/etc to a single common unit that can be switched at the customer's preference (even this breaks down though due to sizing subtlteies in groups of similar things). I've worked for a large electrical/electronic components wholesaler (CEF), and was always an issue -- every supplier has their own metadata conventions, and it didn't matter how careful we were, the sheer amount of products flooded our ability to ensure complete consistency.

A different market, but same issue: the ASOS storefronts I like very much, but as they've absorbed different brands and suppliers, the search filtering has visible suffered over the last few years. Sizing (common problem for all retailers) is the most obvious issue

Just as an FYI, “shop all styles” excludes categories like jackets. A novel take on the word all.

That's awesome, kudos to you!

I just have a memory of shitty Shopify templates that small clothes manufacturers use. I think its pretty uncommon on small merchants.

Off the top of my head three are a few places that do this: REI, Norse Projects, End Clothing, Mr. Porter, adidas, and a few others. It should be more common though. I wonder if it used to be harder to know at search time if you were OOS on a particular UPC.

I'm always astonished by how it's 2021 and Amazon doesn't know my shoe size. Rather, they must know it, they just refuse to use it to help me find shoes.

Along the same lines: if your store has multiple locations, allow me to filter by location. Sometimes I don't care so much about the exact product (think audio cables), I just want to be able to go to the closest store and pick it up.

Online auto parts stores tend to do this well. Specify the make, model, year, and engine of your car and you only see parts that apply to you. It works so well that it's easier to browse the categories than to use search in well-curated stores.

For example, https://idparts.com is a highly-curated store that sells parts for diesel-engine cars, mostly Volkswagens. If I need a car part I look here first.

Showing an attractive item which is currently out of stock would make complete sense, if there'd be an box to put an email and be notified when it's back in stock.

You can filter the entire stock by size on Amazon https://i.imgur.com/3QGQVZI.png

Yeah but then 70% of the results are wrong. Amazon's filtering sucks

This is even worse with shoes or pants online, where you have a large matrix of size by color.

It should save your size in your profile and pre-filter the whole site.

it's possible in germanys zalando. I always do this.

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