Filters
Being an ardent online shopper, most likely you too are, searching for the right product from the right website to get the right experience(price, delivery, service) is a tedious task.
One of the things that makes life easy for us is Filters.
They come in different shapes with different features. Sliders, Checkboxes, Radio buttons, Input boxes and so on.
A right combination of those aids in product discovery.
But a lack of relevant filters makes the product buying journey tough.
Despite India having around 5 unicorn e-commerce sites, I don’t feel anyone has cracked the product for perfect set of filters even for popular selling products.
Problems
- Mis-labeling/Categorizing
If you look at the screenshot while purchasing a landline phone, you would scratch your head on the type of categories these obsolete phones have here.
It is a very common problem across most marketplaces, very likely arising due to uncontrolled input from sellers while listing their products.
Here’s another screenshot from PayTM for the same product search. You must have encountered it on other websites.
Solution: Only if companies could spend little extra time and build better processes for getting these cleaned to remove the ambiguity and make the process simpler.
2. Missing Filters
Understanding the customer’s requirement/specifications for a product is a critical part of sales process. Filters help e-commerce websites understand the same. But what if there’s no one listening? Precisely what happens when there are too few filters.
Let’s say you are buying a laptop(most people fear buying it online in India!) and wish to purchase the latest 6th generation (2016) Intel laptop. You head to Amazon’s laptop store and see thousands of laptops listed. As you start specifying the RAM, budget etc, you realise there is no way to specify which generation processor you want, and this on the “best” e-commerce website we have on the planet and probably the safest place to buy a laptop from! Now you have to browse through all the previous generation laptops.
Even if you are a Flipkart Fan which does provide various filters, a simple popular filter for Weight is missing for laptop category where many business professional prefer to have a light weight portable laptop.
The major reasons I can speculate for not providing such filters could be
a) Too many filters b) People don’t need it/use it
and lastly but the most likely one
c) We don’t care, let the customer play Treasure Hunt!
Solution: Providing advanced filters to consumers shouldn’t be challenging, it’s just a more complex database query and a little work on UI. Lack of data points related to the filter during product cataloguing is also a cause but a stringent check will help the company/seller provide accurate details.
3. Flexibility of Filters
So you want to buy a mobile and are particular about say a 4.7 or 5.2 inch screen, in between the popular categories of 5 to 5.5 inch, what happens is companies specific values for the filters and don’t allow user to modify it using a slider or custom input box. (it’s usually there for price)
In this case the user again has to go through a long list of items which he most likely won’t be buying. Also, these categories are confusing if product lies in the boundary case, as you can see from the two screenshots, if someone’s looking for 4.5 and 5 inch device they may have to check multiple checkboxes in Flipkart but not in Amazon.
In some cases there is no option to check multiple categories at once (a radio button instead of checkbox) and that also means user has to go through two sets of products separately to find the relevant one.
Solution : This probably is a tough one compared to others and e-com companies would have already been putting though on how to segment the choices, but still since one size can’t fit all, and as a feature for advanced users a custom input can be designed.
4. Ratings Filters
One of the features I love to use and the best thing I like about Amazon, the ability to filter products by ratings of customer review and it’s also the primary reason I hate Flipkart for!
Since Amazon and Flipkart are two platforms where there is a significant portion of genuine reviews, ratings help a customer make the right choice and why would you like to buy an unrated or 1 Star product. The ability to quickly separate the best from the rest. Also, number of ratings can play an important part in finding which product is among the bestsellers and best rated.
I am yet to understand why Flipkart doesn’t provide this option of filtering (by customer ratings) despite sitting on huge number of reviews.
(Shoutout) I would be glad if anyone can give a good enough reason for Flipkart to not allow product filtering based on ratings.
Snapdeal does provide the feature but reviews don’t seem as authentic as Flipkart or Amazon. More on reviews later in my next article.
Based on filters alone, Snapdeal does provide extensive filtering and user rating based filtering as well,
Amazon lacks in diversity of filters but they are more authentic in general especially for ratings,
Flipkart seems to be expanding filters but for me it would best make sense when it rolls our customer rating based filters. It doesn’t make sense to talk about the rest as of now.
Some good examples of filters which I feel empower the user are:
Myntra : Variety of filters in a compact interface, probably because they are focussed on one kind of product which is fashion.
GSMArena
The most extensive advanced filters which obviously are not that user friendly is on GSMArena Phone Finder
Future Filter Feature
One of the features, I feel filters can provide is the ability to pick a box and not display those items, basically (Deciding by elimination of choices! ) , So the ability to select/deselect choices using checkboxes. This can especially be useful if there are large number of categories in a particular filter. E.g. In a list of brands, you may not like to choose few of them while giving consideration to the rest.
I am yet to find it being implemented somewhere.
Let’s hope these billion dollar companies keep improving their filters (Obviously they already do! :) to help us save time and make the product purchase process smoother.
Would love hearing feedback and ideas from people who are building these.
If you too like shopping online, you might find my article Hunting Deals useful, though it’s a little outdated.
Few more issues, to be updated later.
5. Missing Data
As already evident, for best filters the product listing has to be as detailed and accurate as possible. Even if a company provides the filters but the value of the field is not present while cataloguing , the filter would never show the product. Like in the screenshot here you can see, a basic parameter about the mobile Battery Capacity and Screen Size, if you add the total number of products (I know you won’t)! it would be different because battery size data for many mobiles is not entered.
Solution: Improved Product Listing (IPL! ) is the key as always
