Poll: What do you find buying online really hard or annoying? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What do you find buying online really hard or annoying?

14 pointsrevorad59 comments

I'm building a shopping site because I find online shopping for some products really frustrating. The idea is to have one site where you can search for all options for a given product category and quickly filter down to the one you want to buy.

I have some product categories in mind that I would like to work on, but I want to know what you would find useful.

Please vote for one or more of the following and comment below to say what you find most frustrating about buying that online. What would you like to be fixed?

Thanks!

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Housing. Period. Craigslist is pretty much the most painful thing to use when looking for an apartment. But they have a lock on the supply side.

Aren't there lots of good alternatives to Craigslist now?

At least here in the UK, we have the following which are good:

http://nestoria.com

http://rightmove.com

http://findaproperty.com

http://www.globrix.com

try http://sfbay.cribq.com/

or the mobile version http://itunes.apple.com/app/craigslist-housing-maps-cribq/id...

* not affiliated with this, just happen to know it was created to solve your gripe

http://padmapper.com

I used http://www.padmapper.com/ when finding an apartment a few months ago. It's basically a Craigslist/Apartments.com/etc aggregator that puts each listing at its approximate location. Super useful, especially if you are moving to an unfamiliar city.

Commenting only because I was asked to on Twitter:

I don't find any of the above difficult, because of the enumerated items, the only ones I buy are computers and software. Computers: Dell works; software: most easily distributed good in world.

Almost all of my furniture/etc is hand-me-down from someone or other. When I need something not in the set, I go straight to the big $WHATEVER store and ask the friendly salesman "What is the best selling $ITEM?" because there is no way that I'm going to outresearch Japan on consumer electronics.

What can I say? You're a man of simple needs :-)

I expect things might get slightly more complicated if/when you have a family.

Regarding software, distribution is clearly not the problem. But distribution is not a problem for most other things now. Choosing what to buy out of a hundred options is the problem. That's what I'm trying to help people with.

Thanks for taking the time to answer. Hope you didn't find the tweet rude.

I buy all of these things online except furniture (where the need to see it can override everything) and home appliances. I find home appliances crazy difficult to buy and usually end up going to a store. Why? I find it hard to get a perspective for ranges online, they're always pushing me towards the most "popular" middle of the road item.

For appliances, a lot of shopping sites also neglect to include significant information like dimensions weight, or where various pipes connect to the appliances.. which you can easily figure out in person. You really don't want to be doing a return on a washer dryer or even a vacuum cleaner, but the smallest of differences can make an item useless (such as if the outlet pipe on a dryer is on the wrong side/place or if a cooker is 2 inches too wide for the existing gap).

Thanks for your input, Peter. The appalling lack of good practical product information is very high on the list of things I want to fix.

Can you elaborate a bit on ranges? I'm not sure what you mean.

I guess I just mean being able to see the entire range of a certain product easily. Some sites get it right (computer sales are good at this) but sometimes you have to guess at keywords/model names, especially on sites like Amazon.

If I want to see all the Dysons from cheapest to most expensive with a few key specs about each (why are they different?) that can prove tricky.

Having the instruction manual online is a plus too. I want to know all about the product before I buy it.

Hires pictures of the product from all sides. So many sites use have only small pictures. Even when Amazon has pictures, you're only allowed to see a small part of it at a time. My big display is so bored.

Tools and supplies for my bladesmithing hobby. The supply sites that do exists have really terrible web presences and they still do much of their business with paper catalogs.

Most of the stores don't have items categorized more than one level deep nor by the properties of the item. There are all sorts of options for something as simple as an anvil or a pair of tongs.

God help you if you need handle hardware. You have to go through 40 pages of little, crappy pictures of items to find what you're looking for.

When you go to checkout, you're lucky if you can complete your order without reloading your cart a half-dozen times.

Then there's the whole quality thing. There are vanishingly few reviews on these sites. If you could aggregate reviews on similar items, it would be great.

But a problem with aggregating reviews is that a certain part might be imported from China on one site and the same part might be laser cut in house on another site. There's no real way to tell the difference without having the two items in hand.

Edit to add some links to examples: http://www.knifemaking.com/Default.asp http://www.piehtoolco.com/ http://www.usaknifemaker.com/

Thanks gaustin. I certainly didn't know it was so hard to buy stuff like that. This UK site looks quite good - http://anvils.co.uk. Would something like that be useful?

Yeah. That's one of the better sites. It's responsive and well-organized.

It could be improved. It would be nice if prices and a primary characteristic or two, like weight for hammers, could be moved up a level. Or at least add search filters like New Egg does for each spec of a component.

E.g., Hammers -> Straight Pein -> 1-2kg

Try approaching from the side---Silversmithing and Woodworking have a number of good sites. These may lead to at least some equipment that you want. Don't know as I'm not a knifesmith, silver is good enough for me :)

I have never found a good grocery delivery service that had an interface that didn't make me want to shoot myself.

Yes, that's a big one, although I must say I've been pleasantly surprised by the big supermarkets online service here in the UK. The Tesco and Asda websites are not exactly usability masterpieces but they are pretty good.

At least http://Tesco.com has the gallery sliders so you can browse. http://vons.com makes you drill down through endless, nebulous taxonomies. The browsing method of shopping that we are accustomed to isn't being satisfied. I just want to navigate to the produce section and see images of all the produce.

I agree. A lot can be improved there. The reason I'm not touching this is that a few big boys have complete control over actually selling those things affordably. I haven't looked into it much, but if my users can't fill a basket full of things and checkout at one of the stores, it won't be very useful.

I find the Ocado website (and mobile app) quite good. Their service is also excellent.

Yes, they are really good but more expensive than the others.

Clothing. Granted, I hate buying clothes in person too, but not being able to try things on makes it seem like quite a gamble.

I'm staying away from clothing for now, because I am neither super interested nor knowledgeable about it. I feel it will take a vastly different approach to sell clothes than other product categories.

Zappos has free shipping both ways in case you want to return it.

I've never bought clothes online. Free 2-way shipping does sound quite good, but if it means I still have to make a trip to the post office to return something then I feel I may as well go to a clothes shop.

I think one of the problems is that there is just too many choices, something better would be where you just tell your budget, and are given the top 3 options in your budget.

The problem with that is I'd never be 100% sure that the 'top 3' options presented were actually the 'top 3' in terms of quality, and not the 'top 3' in terms of which company spent the most on advertising

How do you solve that problem now?

I don't have the problem now, because I don't have one site presenting me with 3 choices. I can go and look at reviews and other information on a number of different sites.

Well that's certainly the biggest problem I'm trying to tackle. I'm thinking of various approaches: one is to provide much better filtering and sorting tools. But the other is to just recommend the best product for a given price and one more important factor.

Kinda like http://www.justbuythisone.com/ ?

yes but I'd like a bit more justification. i.e. for a camera all it says is high quality images and touchscreen controls.

I'd like something where there is literally a giant essay justifying the reasons for buying X. (i.e. even though this one has less megapixels, it's the better choice since you won't really need all those mega pixels in the real world, and this way you can save 25% of the cost).

I voted for "computers", more specifically: Netbooks.

Ordering one isn't the problem, but deciding for one has been surprisingly difficult. Asus alone has like 12 different models in the market (I kid you not!) and that's not even counting variants of the same product.

Review and price comparison sites have been less than helpful because none seems to carry an exhaustive list. Also their filtering and sorting capabilities tend to be a (bad) joke.

Yes, and I find it's the same with laptops. I'm not sure about netbooks lasting very long as a category. I think we'll just end up with small laptops and tablets on the not-so-serious-machine end.

Personal care products. There are too many products out there, and it's really hard to pay attention to all of the brand names and what is good/bad.

Now, if this could be coupled with some sort of user history, and some predictiveness regarding other care products (e.g. if I show preference towards unscented soap, it's likely that I will prefer unscented shampoo), that would be awesome.

Thanks veyron. That's one I wasn't thinking of, probably because I don't buy much of those.

Where do you buy these online now? What are the most important things for you while choosing a personal care product?

Sorry for the long response, but you asked some thought-provoking questions ...

I gave up looking for good personal care products because the process, both in-store and online, is painful and confusing (confusing because there are many brands and they keep on changing labels, painful because when taking a chance with a bottle generally involves purchasing at least a month's supply, and it sucks when you hate your body soap)

Nowadays I just purchase in bulk from costco (it's a bulk-discount store). But if there were a compelling alternative, I would switch in a heartbeat.

Important things for the experience (based on my complaints about the process):

- Make it easy to try lots of brands, even if you charge a little bit to do so. I would gladly spend a very small amount of money on a week's supply or a few day's supply of a brand so I could try it.

- Have a more user-driven recommendation scheme (like netflix, but doesnt have to be so advanced) -- maybe you could even figure out most commonly used combinations ...

- Remember the last products I ordered, and allow me to indicate if they were good or bad. I dont want to accidentally buy a deodorant I hated and I definitely don't want to have to remember what products I'm using now.

- Quick-order flight-friendly bottle pack. My dream: one click to overnight my current set of products to my place here or at my destination. (Yes, I know that hotels provide most goods like this, but they are geared toward the expected behavior of the clientele -- i really really dislike the hermes soap at la bristol)

Personally, I like unscented products through and through. Except for cologne, which I use sparingly (for now it's JPG Le Male, which I won in some charity raffle a long time ago)

Home fixtures. Specifically, looking for anything by dimension - I have yet to find any way to find a medicine cabinet for a rough opening of 12.5"x16.5", for instance, or a register of 8"x10" - both actual examples of things I need for my renovation and can't find online or offline (offline because nobody local carries odd dimensions).

Yes, that's one I've got on my list of specific things. I'm amazed someone like Ikea hasn't done this already.

What gets me is when you Google 12.5"x8.5" you'll get "hits" from price aggregators - but the link goes to some random list of stuff that doesn't even have those dimensions. I fricking hate spam.

I've found that to be the case with a lot of Google ads. It's extremely annoying and I intend to fix it at least for the classes of products I include in my store.

Currency. Exchanging currency for travel is horribly inefficient and costly.

Legal pharmaceuticals. Hard to sort the legitimate sites from the scams and counterfeits.

Anything involving PayPal. (The reasons have been discussed on HN ad infinitum, no need to repeat in this thread.)

Bitcoin. The dominant exchange is buggy, secretive and untrustworthy. The best alternative is to actually send cash in the mail to strangers.

How about cars? Despite extensive Flash sites for ever make and model, as well as a million third-party sites (Edmunds.com, etc), if I want to search for a sedan that offers a manual transmission and uses regular gas, and then sort by torque, weight, and price, I have zero options.

Of course, I would only use this service once every 5-10 years, so it may not be a big money-maker.

There's YC-backed Carwoo - http://carwoo.com. I believe they are quite experienced guys and have built relationships with lots of US dealers.

Even though any individual won't use such a service often, each sale is quite big in absolute terms (compared to other verticals I'm considering) and a lot of people buy cars. So, it is a big market but not one I'm currently thinking of, mainly because I'm only looking at stuff you'd actually order online.

In Israel - pretty much everything. All the sites are broken in a lot of browsers, using questionable security practices and most importantly not accepting Paypal (we also have a problem with Paypal double converting NIS->USD->NIS).

There is an opportunity here (R2L E-Commerce system), but I'm too lazy to grab it.

That surprises me, considering that Israel is often said to be a thriving startup hub.

I don't need any more filtering or sorting. I think there needs to be more editorial, sort of like Consumers Reports. The biggest problem now is that reviews all cover only a single product. I want to see reviews that cover a product category. Comparison reviews are so much more useful than single item reviews.

I'm a bit torn on reviews. While I find them useful, I often find myself not much closer to a decision after having read a bunch of reviews. Often, I end up more confused.

Once you've read some reviews, how do you choose one product to buy?

any kind of replacement parts: - kitchen appliances - automotive - garage door opener - electronics

yes, there are specialty sites for most of these but wow, all such sites are categorically awful.

I did think of that, but have no idea how big that market is. Do you replace parts a lot? Where do you buy them now?

Clothes! I think it's the one thing I can't seem to buy online. Too much hussle of "guessing" what size will fit you, or buy a few and then return them.. bah, I'll just walk to the store.

Well, that's exactly why I'm not thinking of them. If I have to return them, I may as well go to a shop, try them on and buy what fits.

But I think more and more people will buy clothes online. So it is a good market, but it will probably take a different approach than other products. I might consider it down the line.

Food. I would like my supermarket to deliver me stuff twice a week without me ever going there.

Too bad sparkbuy is shuttered.

Yes sparkbuy was a great site. There's http://decide.com and http://shopobot.com in the same space, but their focus is on predicting when to buy a particular product.

For those saying "clothes", since the OP is not interested in getting into this space (and it's also a very big space), I was wondering if we could have a separate discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727464

Thanks.

Clothing.

Clothes

motorcycle tires

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