It’s the one time of the year when I spend more than the normal amount of time on online shopping sites. And the same as every other year, it seems like major online retailers have learnt little about user’s shopping habits.
One of the common horrors on sites such as debenhams.com is that that the designers seem to believe that people think in terms of brands, rather than categories of items – for example, I’ve visited the site thinking I’d like to buy a gift for an aunt – maybe something like bubble bath. Easy enough, right?
- Step one, visit the site.
- Step two, go to the beauty section.
- Step three, find the “Bath & Body” range.
- Step four… Select a brand. Huh?
The flaw here is that I can’t just browse all the items in the “Bath & Body” section – I have to pick a brand to continue. So now, I need to select a brand and browse through those items; if I don’t like what I see, I have to go back, choose another and keep going. Often in these cases I don’t even know the brands or have any suggestion of what sort of items that that brand covers – forcing me to navigate continually into areas that I probably don’t care about.
Unfortunately for the end user, product managers think in brands whereas most consumers – with perhaps the exception of some high fashion items – tend not to, particularly if they’re just trying browse and virtually “window shop” for ideas.
OMG…I know exactly what you are talking about. And it’s not just online retailers who do it either. There are coupon sites out there that do exactly the opposite. They make you search through 10 categories and sub-sub categories but never let you say what store or product you’re searching for. Irritating to say the least. If you could say one thing to online retailers about this, what would you say? I’d tell them to hire a consultant that actually cares about consumers and then actually listen to that consultant. Even though, from personal experience, I know that isn’t likely to happen, on either count. I have yet to find more than about TWO online retailers that don’t have some sort of serious flaw in their search method. Have you found any good sites out there that are actually worth visiting and don’t take ten hours to navigate, just to find a bottle of lotion?
This isn’t something new. We all know that these merchants or shopping sites are marketing, advertising and selling products of brands for the purpose of gaining profit. That’s why before giving you the products they will really present to you their carried brands.
Personally, I love sites that offer products as hot deals or featured products on site. But I love sites that offer a bunch of products of the same kind regardless of their brand. In this case you will be killing the so-called competition. What’s the use of being the number one manufacturer of a certain product if merchants or shopping sites do not give value to brands?