Top 20 Shopper Complaints - With product selection tools on e-Retail sites

Product Selection Tools Are Broken!

Many e-retailers consider the product selection tools (a.k.a. “product finders”, “guided navigation tools”, etc.) on their sites to be ‘good enough’; however this assessment would likely change if some basic success criteria are applied:

• Do shoppers zero in on the products they’re most likely to buy right away, or do they have to spend time reviewing long lists of ‘matches’ in order to come up with a shortlist of truly viable purchase choices?
• Do shoppers need to falsify their ‘real’ buying criteria in a trial-and-error fashion in order to avoid getting zero results, or too many results?
• Do shoppers find it easy to make a purchase decision based on the amount of product information they’re exposed to when reviewing results lists, or are they overwhelmed with product data?
• How confident are shoppers that products of interest aren’t being excluded from the list of ‘matches’? Do they enter overly broad buying criteria ‘just to make sure’ viable product choices don’t get filtered out?
• Do shoppers frequently abandon their shopping process during the product selection phase?

For most e-retailers, the answers to these questions suggest that current product selection technologies largely fail to fulfill their most basic purpose, that of enabling shoppers to quickly zero in on the products of greatest interest without having to wade through large amounts of product data.

The Consequences: The Top 20 Shopper Complaints

As part of its product design process, ChoiceBot interviewed online shoppers regarding their feelings about product selection tools commonly found on e-retail sites. The result was a list of over twenty major complaints, all of which were voiced frequently. This list can be found below, along with the solutions that ChoiceBot developed over four years of concept refinement that address every single one of these complaints.

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