Having moved house recently, I spent a lot of time online researching properties and I also began to look for sofas online, and was surprised by what I found. Given that I was just browsing and not really sure what I was looking for, I tried the websites of a couple of major UK furniture retailers (who shall remain nameless) and picked the most generic category to begin browsing.
It was then that I found that, although there were often 60+ products for me to view, there was no sort function on the product results – I couldn’t view the products in order of price, colour or anything else, I was stuck with the random order that I was given. It was then that I decided that it wasn’t worth spending the time going through all the results and left the websites.
Amazon is a great example of a much more user friendly approach to selling sofas. The website not only offers a sort function but also a faceted browsing function (see image) which allows you to filter out results that aren’t your desired brands or in your price range (among other things).
A sort function really is basic usability for an ecommerce website and without it, retailers will probably find that a lot of users drop-off because they don’t want to spend the time looking through all the results to find suitable products.
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Robert commented on 15 June 2009 at 2:28 pm
Sounds like the Wickes website where you can’t even sort by price! Try sifting through their range of doors at the price you are willing to pay.
ChrisD commented on 26 August 2009 at 8:51 pm
Great article. Some very interesting points here. My aim with my site http://www.cheapfurniture.org.uk is to display galleries of furniture from as many UK suppliers as possible so people can browse all available styles and colours. I will certainly take these comments into consideration as using xml feeds I may be able to add sorts and filters the retailers themselves don’t offer on their sites. Any comments/suggestions are very welcome!