Last night I was roaming around online looking for places to get a large sectional couch for our new house. To not leave out any options, I headed over to the La-Z-Boy site to see what they have to offer. I assumed that if anyone knows how to make a gigantic, all-about-comfort, family-style sectional, it’d be them. That may be true, but what I found is that La-Z-Boy has no idea how to sell their couches online.
You go to their site, and you click couches. Then you click sectionals. What you’ll get next, I thought was an error. 64px by 64px. That’s the size of the images you’re given to try to find a style you like. No options to make images larger. 4,096 total pixels. Take it or leave it. 100 pixels are equivalent to 1 inch in real life. What they’re doing is the equivalent of printing a catalog where the images are just shy of 3/4″ by 3/4″. Are they trying to convince you to shop elsewhere? This is the brick-and-mortal equivalent of forcing their customers to look at furniture through the wrong end of a telescope.
It’s amazing to me that when a company’s sole purpose is to sell furniture, they can be so incredibly bad at doing it online and still stay in business.
3 Comments
here, in spain, there are a lot of online shops like that. However, there are also online shops very well done, like mine lolacamisetas.com :)
sorry about my very bad english
Hey there Jeffrey,
interesting chain of event that led me to post here, and funnily enough still be on topic. I was looking for a place that sells shirts with proper designs (which, if you’re into traces and catchy one-liners like me, is a pretty hard thing to come by over here in the good ole EU). The market here is pretty thin, and what little there is is print-to-order and insanely expensive (starting at $30 for a simple shirt). As I was reading through some blogs, I stumbled across an interview with you about threadless. Your concept is awesome, because you actually trust your designers enough to actually sell their products instead of being only good for one-offs. There is a promising fledgling company in dusseldorf, germany, that would really benefit from adopting your system, and has some interesting ideas of its own. I’d really love to get you two in touch, if you’re interested – summer’s coming soon. Just don’t start off by criticising them for their tiny previews, mkay?
http://www.la-z-boy.com/furniture/product.aspx?pid=3405
they fixed it?