Ask HN: Problems/Limitations With Online Shopping? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Problems/Limitations With Online Shopping?

7 pointsmstefff18 comments

Been focusing my attention towards online shopping, deal aggregation, and similar sites lately for some reason or another. I know none of us like sharing innovative ideas, but I've been trying to brainstorm what this industry is missing or could use. There hasn't seemed to be too much change in the area. Was curious if anyone had any thoughts on the problems, limitations, or anything related for the online shipping industry - any personal frustrations, etc.

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My biggest problem is with stores that try too hard to be innovative and end up making the process harder. But then, they don't frustrate me too much as I just won't use them.

Other frustrations:

- Gauging availability

- Having easy access to shipping cost info

- Offers or product names that aren't links. If something says "T-shirt sale, $10 each" I want to be able to click on that to see that sale!

- Lack of a categorized view. I want to easily see OTHER products that are very similar to the current one. If I'm looking at a blue shirt, I want to easily find a yellow one (say).

- High shipping costs. I gotta admit, "free shipping" gives me an instant shopping boner, even if it makes no sense. It just makes me more likely to buy.

- Lack of details. If electronics equipment, I want access to the full specs, including dimensions, etc. If clothes, I want to know the sizes and what scale was used (e.g. US size, UK size, or what?)

- Ridiculous registration requirements. I don't want to fill out a 30 field form to become a "member" of your shop. Ask for the absolute minimum to start and then get the other info over time as I become faithful to your brand.

- Lack of any review functionality. Sometimes it doesn't matter, but on many items it does. Even if you're just getting reviews from elsewhere, I wanna see them.

- Sites that don't fully use HTTPS through the whole checkout process.

Things I would like:

- Better search.

- Support for tagging. I like browsing by tag.

- "Random" product link. Not for every store but on some it would be awesome. I like browsing!

- Make it easier for me to browse when I don't know what I want. (I think I've made the point now, lol)

- Offer a clean but powerful advanced search. If I want to buy something for $5-$10, I should be able to limit searches to that.

- "Similar items" when looking at an item. Even if it's just a few with similar names, it helps.

- Easy access to high resolution imagery of the product. Let me click on the thumbnail / smaller image to get more awesome shots. It's a big deal when you're looking at the positioning of ports on a notebook, for example.

- Cheaper and more expensive alternatives to the current product. This is a touchy area for the actual store providers but as a customer I want to quickly work with my budget. Sometimes I want to spend more on something better, or sometimes less.

- Products on the front page of the site. I don't want to have to dig just to reach a single product.

Things I don't care about:

- Comparison tools. Most are useless. If I really want to compare something, I'll load them up in separate tabs and just figure it out after looking at them both. Very few products come down to a spec by spec comparison.

- Splash pages.

- Overuse of "theme" imagery. A common problem with clothing sites. I understand building a brand, etc, but in the store section, give me product.

Great list - what shopping site(s) do you use?

".. instant shopping boner" - hilarious

I use any site that seems professional and competent if I want something I can't get either at Amazon UK ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/ ), Play.com ( http://www.play.com/ ), eBuyer ( http://www.ebuyer.com/ ), or similar large sites (those are all UK examples, just because that's where I live).

eBuyer is worth a look actually, as they've tended to implement a lot of the features I mention above, such as full specs on most products, high res images, easy browsability, etc. They might have some ideas you can "be inspired" by :)

Oh, to add to my previous list. If I were in the US, I'd want to see the price including tax (alongside the regular price) if I were in the same state at the store. Having the price leap up at checkout is not nice (as I constantly whine when shopping in the US).

Good point about the sales tax, I hate getting whacked with an extra 10 bucks at the last step of checkout. I assume they're waiting until you give a billing address, but at least make an attempt with geolocation.

Thumbs up on this list!

I'll echo your points about discovery. Lots of amazing products occupy the long tail that I just don't know about. Amazon does a decent job with their "you may also be interested in" algorithm but they could make the process a lot more fun.

Something else I realized I always do..

If I see a "promo code" box when buying, I always Google for a promo code for that store, or try retailmenot.com to see if they have one.

Sometime I get one, sometimes I not, and I feel a teeny-weeny pissed off when I don't find one that works as I feel someone else is "beating" me. So.. perhaps seeding a very, very tiny discount promo code out there for people like me would make me remember your store more because you let me "win" for my ingenuity :)

I get this feeling that clothing is THE consumer product but nobody buys clothes online because:

1) sizing is screwy

2) it's impossibly kludgy to browse clothing, textures, etc.

3) a painful return process

SO, I'm waiting for a department store with:

1) ONE pair of each item

2) ZERO inventory,

3) With all that additional space, a MASSIVE selection

3) Everything gets shipped straight to your home.

When you walk into the store they measure you, scan your credit card, and hand you a barcode scanner. Scan what you want and the perfectly sized clothing shows up on your doorstep in a day or two.

Nice side effects:

1) No more fear because it's easy to take back to the store if you don't like it.

2) For all the people that don't live in NYC or LA there would finally be a store with a decent selection...

3) Few clothing stores actually track purchases-- finally, you could now have a killer recommendation system that people would actually trust.

Solves so many problems (and probably creates a few). It kind of reminds me of Service Merchandise back in the day where they only had one item out front and everything else in the warehouse-- except now the warehouse is in "the cloud" so to speak.

...I already do this at Barnes & Noble-- browse for what I want and I've already Amazon Prime'd the book before I walk out the door...

Beyond the obvious technical challenges to me the biggest question is whether the economics of it works when you individually ship everything from a central location.

My wife buys 90% of her clothing online from shops in Europe and the USA. The key to making the experience work for her is that she only uses shops with sensible returns policies.

Disagree that no one buys clothing online. It's a massive industry.

Agree that the process is broken. I know someone who orders multiple sizes and colors of a single item and returns most of it after trying it all on. Lot of obvious inefficiency here.

I wonder how much a place like zappos (great return policy) pays for all the returns at the end of the day. I know shoes aren't clothes strictly speaking but it suffers from similar issues.

There are two major things I want from online shopping:

Real time stock data. I don't care so much about quantities, just whether or not my size/color is in stock -- though a "low quantity" warning would be nice.

Ship my order within 24 hours, and with "free" overnight shipping. If I order a pair of pants tonight (1 am on Thursday morning), I should have them Friday. Now I know nothing's really free, but build it into your prices; don't make me think. Pull this off, and you're 80% of the way to matching brick and mortar retail -- it takes a day or two to build a shopping trip into my schedule anyway.

Interesting and good suggestions. I've been thinking more about aggregation, comparison, organization, etc, aspects - not exactly the 'store' behind the scenes.

Regarding aggregation: I don't use rss at all, no feed collection, no feedreader. I get mostly everything I read online from HN and sites like it.

I'm not aware of anything similar for clothing. My process for checking out new stuff looks a lot like my tech news process did a year or two ago: type in techcrunch.com, read, type in mashable.com, read...

I'm not saying digg-style voting and karma is the way to do it, but I'd love a place where I could get the same kind of curated updates and discussion about new clothes/gadgets/etc. I certainly wouldn't check it every day like I do HN, but I imagine there are people who would.

well a number of large shopping sites and deal/coupon sites work based on aggregation. the user doesn't need to know anything about it. look at like.com - an amazing shopping portal/search engine - all aggregation. they just refer to products on other store sites.

like.com is definitely impressive, but I guess the point I mean to make is that sometimes I don't want choice. When I come to a site like HN, I get 30 vetted stories and discussions relevant to programmer-entrepreneurs.

Something similar for clothing, targeted to my demographic, (20s/male) would be hugely useful.

Regarding aggregation: I don't use rss at all, no feed collection, no feedreader.

I'm an extremely heavy user of RSS and RSS-like technologies, but I don't (and probably wouldn't) use them for shopping related things whatsoever. If a product is unavailable, I like being able to put my e-mail address in to get notification of availability though :)

The only exception to the above would be if we had something like woot.com in our country. I'd quite like to get an RSS or Twitter notification of that :)

(Slightly off topic) I know there are a lot of startups doing a physical-internet crossover similar to QRCode, but they read bar codes instead. The only issue I see with this is that not every item has a bar code (i.e. clothes) and it requires the cooperation of both online and brick-and-mortar stores.

Augmented reality for physical shopping anyone? Stick RFID/bluetooth emitters in the security-ink devices, stick the security devices to the clothes, and then pull out your phone to get relevant information.

They don't ship worldwide. Sometimes they do, but not for every item. And they don't make it clear from the start.

This is the biggest single limitation that I encounter constantly.

thanks for the comments everyone

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