I used to get frustrated when someone beat me to a post, especially when my post had been delayed due to other committments. I’ve shrugged that off these days as I like being economical and afterall, linking to existing related work is sort of the point of hypertext, right?

One of the blogs I subscribe to, ‘Software As She’s Developed’ by Michael Mahemoff covered and extended upon some thoughts and frustrations I’d been having with ecommerce sites recently (or forever, I guess).

I’d recently decided that I should get over my disappointment with the I-Mate KJam and should get a new phone. Having been burnt before I wanted to research the phone well and feel like I had surveyed what is available. Being in the field I am I surmised that online would be the place to undertake this research. It would be a pinch. A saturday morning would do it, surely.

I have now decided, after days of research, that it is impossible to do thorough shopping research painlessly online. I can only assume that the expense of setting up a good online shopping experience is beyond but the biggest of players. And even the good examples I found are not yet frictionless from frontpage to checkout and are also rarely localised to Australia yet.

This post covers a few technical reasons why many sites are more costly from a time standpoint than they need to be. I’ll try not to restate too much of what is said there as the post already covers it nicely and is worth a read.

Instead i’ll raise some additional rationale for why commerce online is still in its infancy and why many likely abandon it for the bricks and mortar encased sales-people of the real world.

So firstly, lets explore the why of the activity.

Why shop online at all?

If its easier to just go to the shop, compare products side-by-side and to interact with the sales people to clarify facts you are unsure on then why bother with online shopping at all?

Well, I did, in frustration abandon an online purchase for an offline one but I felt a few basic drawbacks from the experience :

• Sales people’s incentives do not always align with yours. A quick way to test this (and I did) – ask them a question about the product you already know the answer to and you will notice the response usually was what they felt you wanted to hear rather than factually correct.
• Its a massive task to compare products within a store as well as across competing stores. It strikes me as being suited to an online activity where data processing is common activity

Shop front clutter
Many sites lose me on the front page. I dig around a bit but generally a front page brimming full of thousand of links and thumbnails doesn’t bode well. Only oddball bric-a-brac types appreciate clutter – and only because they know it means normal people wont have found their precious treasures yet. I don’t want to see all your products and specials and categories on your front page if it obscures the basic information I am after (like, do they even sell phones?). With the phone buying experiment I found it hard to locate a full list of phones sold by a particular telecommunications provider.

Shop fronts on the web are not equivalent to shop fronts in the real world. They are more like what a shopper sees as the enter a real shop – everything! It of course could be much more effective than a real shop because you should be able to search for exactly what items you are after and get straight to them. My supermarket still fails me in this regard because I often find myself scouring the isles trying to reverse-engineer the reasoning behind why they placed the milk next to the pet food and not near the bread.

No feature comparisons
If you are looking for a phone, a tv, a car (and these items seem quite popular among humans) then you usually find yourself in a ‘feature-off’ where feature-laden products vie for your approval. Of course, certain aspects about you will help determine which features are important to your purchase decision (your bank balance/credit, existing items you own like the Blueray enabled PS3 you just bought etc.)

Having a dozen or more tabs open is a terrible way to compare obscure details between each of products. At this point I must give some kudos to shopping engines like the one powering tech.yahoo.com which facilitate easier feature comparisons. Why are their still so few ecommerce sites that support this functionality (and, indeed, when can I see a version of tech.yahoo localised here in Australia)?

Can’t bookmark ready for easy comparison

Hopefully most sites support bookmarkability these days (those that don’t are definitely missing out on sales) however, as cool as modern bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us are, they do not cater specifically for shopping and can’t extract the attributes of the products you’ve shown interest in. I’ve a feeling that before long we will see an extensible product microformat become widely adopted which browsers or shopping spiders could read however for now we must rely on the site to provide this functionality.

I’ve a feeling I could continue this list forever but I am interested in frustrations you’ve had with online commerce. What improvements can online stores make?

Stumble it!