2006.11.24
The perils of Internet shopping
A recent experience with a brick-and-mortar store has got me thinking about buying things on the internet, and what sorts of products make sense to buy online.
In this particular case, I’m going to name names. The retailer is Pier 1 Imports, and they have a fairly decent web site (as web sites go for their sort of products). It gets bonus points for the following:
- It has a reasonably complete listing of available products.
- It allows you to check stock at their stores.
- There don’t seem to be a lot of products that are exclusive to the US stores – all of the products I checked were available at their Canadian stores as well.
So far, I’ve come up empty-handed in my quest for two items of furniture: a bench for my front entry hallway, and a laundry hamper for my bedroom. I thought I should check out what Pier 1 had, so I surfed over to their web site.
My laundry hamper requirements are pretty stringent – the physical dimensions have to be such that the hamper is no more than 14″ deep, and it has to fit in with the other bedroom furniture. With the bench I’m more forgiving. I’m looking for something roughly 48″ in length and 18″ deep, although style is more important than size.
While browsing Pier 1′s web site, I found two benches that looked promising, and a laundry hamper that fit the depth requirement and that I sort of liked the looks of. So I checked the local stock, called up the nearest store to make sure they had display models of the three items on the floor, and set off to check them out in person.
It turns out that none of the three are what I’m looking for. The benches looked a lot like the web site, but the upholstery color was different than I was expecting on one of them, and the other had a much higher “lip” than was apparent from the photos on the web site. The laundry hamper was much duller and plainer looking than it appeared on the web site. I was quite disappointed in it in person.
If Pier 1 is guilty of anything, it might by that they wanted their products to look good on the web site so they made sure that they were clean, well-polished, and professionally photographed. No harm, no foul, really. Of course they want to show off the product, but this has a few downsides:
- Color reproduction on web sites in general is not going to be true, less so when the furniture is professionally photographed using non-natural lighting.
- The furniture can be “dressed up” by either choosing the “best” of a given run, high-quality polishing and cleaning, or (very likely) both.
Without going so far to say that these practices are deliberately deceptive, they do lend themselves to a let down when I’ve driven to the store and viewed the pieces in person.
Looking back on this experience, I realize that I would never have bought them online for the above reasons. Something like furniture doesn’t lend itself well to purely online shopping, but online research can be a good tool for narrowing the choices.
The products I do buy online tend to be books, CDs, DVDs, commodity electronics, and the odd mail-order-only thing where I’ve seen one in the real world first. All of these items are mass-produced, and aesthetics aren’t as important as content. I don’t really care what the book’s cover looks like, I’m buying it because I want to read it. And barring a major screwup at the printer, every copy of the latest Harry Potter novel is going to have identical contents.
For almost anything else, I will probably never order it online unless I can somehow manage to find one in the real world and convince myself that the one I’m ordering online will be almost exactly the same as the one I was looking at. Most mass-produced products fit this criteria – I can write down the SKU of the hot new digital camera I’ve been salivating over and find the exact same SKU on Amazon.com to be sure I’m buying what I expect. I can’t necessarily do this with items like furniture since, in many cases, no two pieces are entirely alike.
It also further underscores the importance of trust in any sort of mail order transaction. Sites like eBay try to give an indication of trust, and eBay is quite successful, so it must be doing something right, but when you get right down to it, eBay wouldn’t work if there weren’t an awful lot of trusting (and honest) people out there. I seldom buy things on eBay, and maybe this is part of my problem – I’m too wary perhaps.
The bottom line is that I’ll certainly use the Internet to do a lot of research into a lot of my more major purchases, but I don’t feel I can rely on it 100% as a shopping medium. I’m sure the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping would have something to say about that if a second edition were published today.
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