6 ms·

It drives me nuts that none of their competitors learn this lesson. So you want to buy an Asus wifi router? http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus/asus-routers/pcmc

by Pxtl 11y ago

It drives me nuts that none of their competitors learn this lesson. So you want to buy an Asus wifi router? http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus/asus-routers/pcmcat293200050003.c?id=pcmcat293200050003 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus/asus-routers/pcmcat29320005... Enjoy your paralysis.

xlm1717 11y ago
It's only 24 options and you can filter by what you want to the left of the product listings. Each filter cuts your number of choices by more than half. Who gets paralyzed with this??
- dangero 11y ago
  Your typical human who knows nothing about wifi technology, but knows they need a home wireless router
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Normal people.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    Heck, geeky people who aren't obsessively keeping up with the latest tweaks to wifi router tech.
- 91bananas 11y ago
  Myself, CS degree and a fair amount of digital electronics knowledge.
  - eecks 11y ago
    me too, CS degree and now a software engineer.. choosing over 24 different types of routers is just crazy.
jazzyk 11y ago
Choice is good. It is the _presentation_ of products on the site you referenced that sucks. They should be grouped by speed, etc. "Sort By -> Customer Rating" is a very helpful filter I usually start with.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it. Hell, if I look for Apple Routers, they dont' even list the Airport Extreme - they don't even have the Apple routers tagged consistently - they have both Apple and Apple(R). And then you get this view: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=abcat0503002&cp=1&id=pcat17071&nrp=25&qp=brand_facet%3DBrand~Apple%C2%AE^brand_facet%3DBrand~Apple&sc=Global&searchVariant=B&sp=-bestsellingsort%20skuidsaas&st=categoryid%24abcat0503002&type=page&usc=All%20Categories&seeAll=Brand http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=a...
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    "BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it." Lots of enormous corporations are desperately incompetent at various things; that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to ask for competence. In this case, perhaps Best Buy was very good at selling electronics before the Web became a primary way to shop for products, and never managed to make the transition effectively. It happens all the times.
    - Pxtl 11y ago
      The point is that if you're selling widgets, you have to sell them through the stores you have and not the stores you wish you had. Well, unless you're apple and you can make your own stores, but still - they sell through Best Buy too.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      As someone who works in e-commerce, this is a pretty hard problem to solve. There are so many products, so many categories, so much freaking data for each one that our small company had to hire someone just to help with wrangling all the data. I can only imagine how big Best Buy's merchandising team is. You'd need to get all hands on deck, every month or so, to manually go through the whole store and look for data defects. And have them rotate who looks at which parts every time. You can't automate it, because the failure case is essentially, "It looks wrong." In theory, it's worth the effort, in practice, nobody does it.
Retra 11y ago
Apple doesn't always compete the same way other businesses do in other markets. I know plenty of people who would never even look at Apple computers because they're Windows users, but Windows users have hundreds of options that Microsoft doesn't even make. Apple has much more control over its brand than its competitors do (in some categories.) Nobody goes out to buy an Asus router. They just go out to buy a router, and Asus can't stop them from being flooded with options. By some stroke of fate, Apple can.

by Pxtl 11y ago

xlm1717 11y ago

It's only 24 options and you can filter by what you want to the left of the product listings. Each filter cuts your number of choices by more than half. Who gets paralyzed with this??

dangero 11y ago
Your typical human who knows nothing about wifi technology, but knows they need a home wireless router
sliverstorm 11y ago
Normal people.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Heck, geeky people who aren't obsessively keeping up with the latest tweaks to wifi router tech.
91bananas 11y ago
Myself, CS degree and a fair amount of digital electronics knowledge.
- eecks 11y ago
  me too, CS degree and now a software engineer.. choosing over 24 different types of routers is just crazy.

jazzyk 11y ago

Choice is good. It is the _presentation_ of products on the site you referenced that sucks. They should be grouped by speed, etc. "Sort By -> Customer Rating" is a very helpful filter I usually start with.

Pxtl 11y ago
BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it. Hell, if I look for Apple Routers, they dont' even list the Airport Extreme - they don't even have the Apple routers tagged consistently - they have both Apple and Apple(R). And then you get this view: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=abcat0503002&cp=1&id=pcat17071&nrp=25&qp=brand_facet%3DBrand~Apple%C2%AE^brand_facet%3DBrand~Apple&sc=Global&searchVariant=B&sp=-bestsellingsort%20skuidsaas&st=categoryid%24abcat0503002&type=page&usc=All%20Categories&seeAll=Brand http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=a...
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  "BestBuy is one of the biggest electronics retailers in the world. If they can't sort products properly, then it's not reasonable for a vendor to expect anybody to do it." Lots of enormous corporations are desperately incompetent at various things; that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to ask for competence. In this case, perhaps Best Buy was very good at selling electronics before the Web became a primary way to shop for products, and never managed to make the transition effectively. It happens all the times.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    The point is that if you're selling widgets, you have to sell them through the stores you have and not the stores you wish you had. Well, unless you're apple and you can make your own stores, but still - they sell through Best Buy too.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    As someone who works in e-commerce, this is a pretty hard problem to solve. There are so many products, so many categories, so much freaking data for each one that our small company had to hire someone just to help with wrangling all the data. I can only imagine how big Best Buy's merchandising team is. You'd need to get all hands on deck, every month or so, to manually go through the whole store and look for data defects. And have them rotate who looks at which parts every time. You can't automate it, because the failure case is essentially, "It looks wrong." In theory, it's worth the effort, in practice, nobody does it.

Retra 11y ago

Apple doesn't always compete the same way other businesses do in other markets. I know plenty of people who would never even look at Apple computers because they're Windows users, but Windows users have hundreds of options that Microsoft doesn't even make. Apple has much more control over its brand than its competitors do (in some categories.) Nobody goes out to buy an Asus router. They just go out to buy a router, and Asus can't stop them from being flooded with options. By some stroke of fate, Apple can.