On the Ecommerce Outtakes blog, we talk a lot about what not to do online. In fact, our main focus is to point out where websites go wrong—with the intent, of course, to help improve the e-commerce experience across the web. One trend we’ve been noticing a lot lately is a lack of good filtering and sorting options. It’s a widespread e-commerce epidemic, and it’s high time we cured it.
Shopping around the web these days has become a frustrating affair. Not only is Google serving up obscure blogs on the first page, some of the largest players like Target seem to have forgotten that an excellent shopping experience is what turned them into a household name.
For example, try shopping for bath towels on Target.com. Type in “Fieldcrest towels,” in Google Search and Target comes up first place in the organic listing. Notice too that Target has paid for a PPC ad for “Fieldcrest towels.”
However, once you get to the website, good luck outfitting your bathroom. The towel is supposed to be available in a choice of colors: white/black stripe, white/grey, white/brown, white/green and white/taupe stripes. Yet, only the black stripe photo is displayed for all of the examples. Moreover, the two white/black stripe towels that are pictured are different. One has two stripes and one has four. So not only is the customer unable to see the color so that they can match it to their sea foam rug, they also haven’t a clue as to what design they are buying.
