Oct 18, 2024
3 minute read
Ecommerce is overhyped
In the era of instant gratification, ecommerce has become the go-to shopping method for many consumers. With just a few clicks, you can have almost anything delivered right to your doorstep. However, despite its popularity, ecommerce falls short when contrasting with in-person shopping.
Brick & mortar is iMax 3D compared to ecommerce.
Let's take a walk into a local retailer, Spyder Surf. From the moment you enter its doors, your entire field of vision is immersed in products. If you're looking for a specific item, finding it is quick and effective. At a glance, you spot a wall of sandals or surfboards and walk over to it. You can experience the feel of linen, the smell of surf wax, and the sound of snap buttons. Everything in sight is life size, real, and exactly as it appears.
In-person shopping is a whole other level of immersion. At any given point, you may have hundreds of products in your line of sight, yet somehow, it doesn't feel overwhelming. Now compare this to ecommerce….
On a website, if you try fitting more than twenty products in view on a page it already starts to feel cluttered. A mobile screen is even more limited, often displaying just four products at a time. Even worse, you’re looking at a two-dimensional, one-and-a-half inch tall photograph of the product.
While a casual shopper may observe thousands of products in person without thinking, many will only view a few hundred on a website. The act of paging, scrolling, and searching, results in shopper fatigue.
So how do we fix ecommerce?
These inherent limitations may feel like an existential threat to your ecommerce store, but there’s still hope. Many are betting on the promises of AI-assisted messenger bots, spatial computing, and virtual changing rooms to engage shoppers. Startups are trying to solve ecommerce’s immersion problem through skeuomorphic ideas of mimicking brick & mortar like experiences.
Instead of playing dress-up for brick & mortar, ecommerce should offer unique experiences that in-person shopping could never achieve.
Ask yourself, what is the most important human sense in ecommerce? On a website, you cannot feel linen, you cannot smell surf wax, and you cannot hear the sound of snap buttons. Even visual attributes, such as the shape of a product, are less clear on a two-dimensional screen.
So, what is left?
Color.
Color has the power to draw you in or instantly look elsewhere. It is so influential it can turn pop stars into icons and define your entire aesthetic.
Spyder Surf has over 1,500 products on their website. If you have a specific color in mind, chances are they have it. But how do shoppers find that color? In short, they don’t. When you filter for “blue,” a website will spam you with any product that vaguely resembles blue in no particular order. Somehow, a website that filters colors provides no better of an experience than you get looking for a color in person.
There’s no reason it has to be this way. We live in an era of brain-computer interfaces, language models that invent math, and telescopes that observe the origins of the universe. The future is now, yet the user experience of ecommerce is stuck in the 90s.
Hoppn’s patented “Infinite Color Search” experience is here to make you question every shopping site you’ve ever visited.
Using a color wheel, shoppers can select any nuanced color they desire and instantly find products that match. Even further, Infinite Color Search can surface multi-tone products, such as 90% light blue sneakers with a 10% orange accent. There are 11.2 quadrillion unique combinations of color you can search. And unlike filtering, it does not remove anything. When you select white, you will see white. But as you continue to scroll through the catalog, eventually, you'll reach black.
Suddenly, 1,500 products on a website become easy to navigate. The fun of clicking through the color wheel is an experience brick & mortar could never achieve. It gives shoppers a reason to visit your website over competitors and introduces exclusive insights into your customers’ favorite colors.
Supply and demand
Business is a game of supply and demand. The best businesses know how to curate supply for the demands of specific shoppers and not reduce their audience to a monolith. Customers don’t need to like every product you sell, they just need that one thing. Infinite Color Search is how they find that one thing. Brands that play this game well, stand the test of time.
Hoppn invites you to imagine a future where shoppers can instantly find their perfect piece. That future is here and is available for all Shopify merchants to install!
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