Online Shopping Shortcomings
While there is much good to be said about online shopping there are some areas where it falls well short of the offline experience.
Browsing is too difficult in online stores. No I’m not talking about web browsing. I’m talking about physical browsing. When I’m looking for gifts this issue hurts. I can walk through a store and let many things sweep over me and catch my eye, inspire things to get. I can’t recreate this online. Sure Googling and the various “recommend a gift for…” features are interesting but they fail to stimulate my mind the same way strolling down the aisles of a store does. I know it is comic irony that browsing is the weak spot of a “browser” based activity but such is life.
Online shopping does little to help with shopping for meats and produce. Yes, I can buy my Cheerios online with no problems. When it comes to ordering a rib-eye steak or a tomato I hit a brick wall. Quality is so often lacking. But even beyond quality attributes like color, aroma, ripeness and marbling are difficult to quantify and express so they are simply left out of the online shopping equation.
Online shopping for clothes and shoes exhibits problems similar to those found in meats and produce. Softness of fabric and stiffness of shoe uppers and lowers aren’t listed. Fit of shoes and clothes are nearly impossible to describe. I need a new pair of dress shoes now and want to save some money but I simply can’t trust that a particular shoe will be comfortable.
Companies can go part way to addressing these issues by better describing the products they are selling. Until the internet industry comes up with an effective way to convey product qualities like fit and ripeness and provide an inspiring browsing experience some shoppers will be turned off by the experience and sales will lag.