Earlier today I was doing some online shopping for some boots. I ended up looking on zappos.com, a shopping site that sells shoes, clothing, handbags, beauty supplies, accessories, etc. There are over 7402 boots on the website with the cheapest pair being $28 and the most expensive pair is $2950 (and this is the same for almost every section). On the website to find the specific item you’re looking for, there are filtering options. Since I started out with 7402 freaking options… clearly I needed to use the filters. So I did: Women–>boots–> size 8 (which left me with 6014 options)–>mid-calf, knee high, and ankle–> and then filtered by price…but I still had 852 items available! Even after using 5 different filters. I didn’t even use all of the filters available…The filters available are: Styles, boot shaft, heel height, color, occasion, brand, price, materials, theme, opening circumference, shaft height, accents, pattern, and heel style. Do I want to sit and scroll through 852 pairs of boots when odds are I’ll only like about 10? Definitely not. I think this website is a perfect example of how there is so much shit on the internet that even after filtering we’re still left with an overwhelming amount of information that probably isn’t even relevant to what we want at that moment.
I think it’s the same with music. There are almost 30 million songs on iTunes. No matter how many filters you use, your choice will still be overwhelming. All you can do is hope for good recommendations that are automatically generated based on your former purchases.
I’m completely opposite when it comes to shopping. I love having as many options as possible. One of my favorite clothing websites is 6pm.com (you should check it out by the way!). They have a TON of items you can look through. They have plenty of filters, but a lot of the time, I just select one category– maybe dresses– and I’ll look through every single page that probably include items that aren’t even my size. The funny thing is though, I haven’t bought many items from 6pm.com, but the things I have bought, I love because they are exactly what I want. I am definitely all for choice when it comes to the web regardless of what I might be searching for.