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January 12, 2005Hidden Features on Shopping.comShopping.com has possibly the most detailed product-attribute database on the Web. They allow you to make shopping selections based on everything from the L2 cache on a CPU, to the to the transmission feed of a fax machine, to the additional features on a vacuum cleaner. Sometimes, they even have product attributes that are not available at their Epinions site. It is safe to say that I find myself "feature finding" at Shopping.com more than any other general shopping comparison engine. But there is a catch that feature-driven shoppers need to know about. Not all of these great features are visible when you first arrive at a product category page. Here is an illustration of the problem, along with a possible win/win solution: These are the primary features for the PC Laptops category of Shopping.com.
These are the additional features for PC Laptops, located in the right-side box.
In each step, we click the first link in the right-side box and make a selection. In the first instance, this produces an additional category, Operating Systems.
We select an Operating System and get a new feature link, CD / DVD Type.
Next, we get a link for Use (Home, Education, Corporate, Small Business).
Finally, after all of these steps, we get to select based on Networking Type.
The right-side list now has less than six links,
Summary of Features
Summary of Problems What if a shopper was primarily looking to select a laptop based on Operating System and/or CD / DVD Type? Would they dig deeper to find these features, or would they figure those options were unavailable, and leave? But what if we were to include more options, or all of the options, right from the beginning... Would it overwhelm the shoppers who only want or need to make selections using the most basic features? Would it effectively "break" the layout by pushing some valuable content "below the fold" of the first screen? Recommendation for Shoppers If you come to a category that has more than six links in the right-side box, dig deeper and see if it has hidden features. If so, you might want to drill down until you find all of the features, then return to the category home page for a new search, using the knowledge of the hidden categories to guide your navigation choices. Recommendation for Shopping.com Shopping.com should put a link at the bottom of the right-side lists called "browse all features" that would display all of the available options at the same time. This way, casual searchers would not be distracted, and power searchers would not be discouraged.
Hidden Features on Shopping.com
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