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Feature FindersWhy the lack of attribute-based refinement at Amazon.com?I find this puzzling. Amazon.com does a decent job of breaking its products into sub-categories, but they rarely refine by attributes, and when they do it tends to be haphazard. Take a category that almost everyone does well, digital cameras. Amazon allows us to refine using a narrow (grrr!) range of megapixels, but where are the other attributes, even ones as basic as price? Actually, price-refinement is available on the advanced search page, but this is divorced from the ability to select by megapixels. Right hand, left hand, you know the rest... Perhaps Amazon does not mind letting other sites take the lead in the early stages of the buying process, because many people will have to go through them eventually for things like reviews and fulfillment? Yet, if they are not into attributes, why do it at all, why do it so half-heartedly? Maybe since their early products (books, music, videos) relied on recommendations more than attribute refinement, it is not in their DNA?
Why the lack of attribute-based refinement at Amazon.com?
Pop Quiz #1Question: which site lets you do a search for apartments that allow large dogs > 25 pounds? (not just a generic "allows pets" or "allows dogs" which might or might not include big dogs) A: Apartment Guide Answer: Apartments.com (see: apartments) I've heard the question, "who uses all of these search attributes?" The answer, of course, if nobody uses every product search attribute. But how many people have at least one critical product search attribute? Factor in individual differences, and pretty soon we are talking about a lot of potentially important attributes.
Pop Quiz #1
Attribute-Based Shopping Search ShootoutAttribute-Based SearchFor better or worse, we have more product choices than ever before. A recent search of a shopping comparison site returned over a thousand results for digital cameras. How do we narrow a universe of over a thousand products to one best product? At this point, we come to a fork in the road: We could use an expert review to narrow the choices, but (1) the recommendations might not meet our requirements (2) the how do we know what the reviewer knows? Sometimes, Top "X" Lists come in more than one flavor, i.e. budget conscious vs. power users, but these tools are still crude as they cannot account for our individuality. Enter attribute-based search, the powertool of the do-it-yourself online shopper.
Attribute-based search is inclusive and individual. It is also based on a better bias; that of the shopper, instead of a reviewer. It lets us make an honest evaluation of our requirements, then go searching for products, instead of retrofitting our requirements to a short list of products. In summary, attribute-based search has a hammer-to-nail relationship with the problem of product narrowing, and we can gain much from a division of labor between feature finders and product reviews. But which sites offer the most comprehensive attribute-based search? Behind The Shootout...I counted the number of attributes at six top comparison shopping engines for two types of products: tech-related and home-related. For this mini-shootout, the number of attributes was the only metric, nothing to do with which attributes were included, or how well they were covered. More in-depth measures will likely find their way into a future shootout. note: note: Example: Digital CamerasThe table below shows the differences that can exist for attribute-based search on different comparison shopping engines.
A few attributes are common to all of the sites (price, brand, megapixels). More attributes, such as optical zoom and media format, are on almost all of the sites. Yet, a fair amount of attributes, such as weight and flash type, are unique to one of these sites. No shopping comparison site in this study contains every attribute. Also, sites can cover the same attributes, but display the options in very different ways. This is especially common for numeric-based attributes, i.e. single values vs. narrow ranges vs. broad ranges vs. sorting. Tech-Related Products
Home-Related Products
Summary, by ServiceEpinions/Shopping.com Shopzilla Nextag PriceGrabber Yahoo Shopping MSN Shopping (beta) Overall * for example...when searching for a computer, why should I ever need to choose 512 or 768 or 1024 megs of RAM? If I only need 512, but would like more, the most logical solution is an option to search for greater than or equal to 512. Otherwise, I have to choose between one of two unnecessary limitations. If I choose low (512), I could miss products in the same price range, only with more RAM. If I choose high (1024), I could miss product that meet my need, yet satisfy more of my other wants. Summary, for ShoppersIf you are shopping for tech-related products, most comparison shopping engines have the basic features, and Shopzilla and Epinions look like good sites for advanced features. (Or, if available, a niche product portal, such as dpreviews.com.) If you are looking for "non-geek" products, Epinions is the most reliable starting point, and NexTag and Yahoo Shopping are also competitve. But this brings us to an important point, the integration of attribute-based search and the rest of the buying process. One of these sites is not like the other... Perhaps the most powerful one-two punch in comparison shopping is the transition from attribute-based search to sorted product reviews. After going to all the trouble to refine your results with a precise process, why settle for a list of results that is unordered or undefined? Here is a summary of shopping engines and their ability to sort by the highest-rated products: Overall, if I had to name a winner in terms of attribute-based search, it would be Epinions (Shopping.com). But no site covers every feature, so if a less popular feature is a must-have, you will need to find a shopping engine with the right attribute-based search for your needs. p.s. - if you know any niche product portals with great attribute-based search, let me know. + + + upcoming shootout: Price Comparison Week
Attribute-Based Shopping Search Shootout
More Context For Feature Findersfrom the department of random ideas: No matter where you search for a In-Context Information If you want to see product information in the right place at the right time, look no further than usability-lovin' Epinions. Under resolution on their digital camera feature-finder page, there is a "What is resolution?" link, which leads to a brief description. Also, at the top of the page, they have links to an in-depth buying guide and a practical "wizard" tool. My only quibble is the "What is resolution?" link could include, or link to, information from the buying guide and/or wizard tool, such as how many megapixels you will need for various print sizes. After all, the goal is to give people enough actionable information so they can be comfortable with their buying decision, and you do not accomplish this goal with a dictionary definition. Feature History Graphs Honestly, I don't know if I have seen this before, but the images have been bouncing around in my head for some time. Maybe it can be useful, maybe not. All I am presenting is the possibility that product-feature trends can be useful shopping information. When I say product-feature trends, we could simply track the number of products with each feature over time, but I think it would be more interesting to track changes in user drill-down behavior. Maybe both could be useful, plus the relationship between availability and popularity. We have cool tools for prices (see: NexTag), why no cool tools for features? This first example is probably only good for curiousity...
...but what about features that have competing industry standards? In these cases, pick the wrong format, and bad things happen. In some cases, you will have less cross-device compatibility, and in most cases, you will have less "bang for the buck" over time. In the graph below, all things being equal, which memory format would you choose?
The above examples are for the best-served product category on the Web, digital cameras, but this type of supplemental information could be used for other areas. How about vacations? Let's say you have a limited budget and unlimited flexibility. What if you could look up, by city, the average daily price of airfare and hotels for the last year? Now what if you could overlay that graph with information about temperature and precipitation? Okay, I'd better stop, I'm getting silly. Or am I?... :-) Most-Popular Features Graphs are great, but there are possibilities with text, too.
Amazon.com taps the "collective wisdom" of its shoppers at the item level. Who is to say a comparison shopping site could not do the same thing for the most popular features? Or, in addition to including the number of items in parentheses for each feature-option link, perhaps there is a way to also include a popularity percentage next to all features? Summary Like I say, maybe this could be useful, maybe not. All I know is we have a lot of shopping engines providing roughly the same functionality, maybe it is time for some experimentation.
More Context For Feature Finders
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digital camera
