The problem with steps 2 and 3 is that most of the time people aren't really sure they know what they want. They may have narrowed things down to a category, su

The problem with steps 2 and 3 is that most of the time people aren't really sure they know what they want. They may have narrowed things down to a category, such as laptops as you mentioned, but even then you'd be hard pressed to find someone that absolutely KNOWS they want a laptop. Maybe a netbook + desktop would be a better combo? Or an iMac-style nettop. Furthermore, at any given time people are usually in the market for more than one thing, all at various stages of the buying cycle. So now if we can simplify and treat all cases as "I don't know what I'm looking for" then follow-up to that is "I'm looking". In that case the experience can be optimized around the looking and searching. I think the key concept in searching is, unsurprisingly, speed. Let me look at a lot of products quickly, let me research an individual product quickly, jump back out quickly, jump between categories, jump between different lists, sorts, filters, etc. And I think pg is missing something, as the path doesn't end when a product purchase is made. You have all the nitty gritty of the actual transaction + shipping, but then you have post-purchase life as well. Most stores have you buy the product and then have you go somewhere else for support. Sure you can review the product on the store, but what if you want to hack it? or you have a problem? or you want to upgrade? etc etc. Is it up to the manufacturer at that point? What if you can't find the manufacturer's support resources? We're doing some interesting things here at ProductWiki, but our goal is to create a great base of content and data. I imagine that one day a company will take the open data to create a really nice and innovative shopping experience.