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.

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=a...

"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.

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.

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.

I think it's the issue of the fact that they're selling so many different brands of products across so many different product lines (from fryers to washing machines to routers to laptops). So building the optimal sorting algorithm becomes an exercise for each and every line, and also involves standardizing the fields you receive from a variety of different manufacturers and distributors.

Certainly not an easy game, and definitely a tedious one. I know I'd hate to be on the team tasked with figuring that one out.

Size does not automatically imply competency

Agreed. I think this is one part that the author misses in his article. Overall, choice is not bad, but the feeling of uncertainty caused by an unorganized selection is the problem here.

A similar thing happens in video games. Many developers get feedback from users and UX people that too many options are bad. THey then remove the COMPLETELY, which should not make any sense. Even a small submenu somewhere to enable advanced settings is fine, but removing them? Why?

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.

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??

Your typical human who knows nothing about wifi technology, but knows they need a home wireless router

Myself, CS degree and a fair amount of digital electronics knowledge.

me too, CS degree and now a software engineer.. choosing over 24 different types of routers is just crazy.

Normal people.

Heck, geeky people who aren't obsessively keeping up with the latest tweaks to wifi router tech.