Play.com Summer Sale
Not content with the end-of-summer sale that has become as much of a tradition to online shops as January is to boring shops, Play.com are having a start-of-summer sale.
No, this isn’t one of those crass, probably-paid-for ‘look at all these wonderful deals’-type posts (although you could get a lot less fun out of £10 than Guild Wars). This sale serves primarily to highlight just how badly designed Play.com’s website is. Although not a complete carbuncle like Amazon, it is still pretty difficult to browse. For example: the ‘DVDs under £5′ section of the sale has over 800 DVDs listed over 22 pages. There are no doubt some great offers buried in there, but I am not sifting through 22 pages of crap just to find one cheap DVD.
It’s not as if it’s hard to do it well. Comet (which has a pretty poor reputation) and Dabs (which has an excellent reputation) both manage to produce differently-focused, but excellent websites. For example, if buying a printer from Dabs I could choose whether I wanted Laser, Inkjet, Dot Matrix, or Thermal. I could then choose what price range I wanted, whether I wanted networking capability, and just about every other characteristic you could think of. Why can’t Play.com do something similar with its stuff? Allow us to narrow down a category - for example in the DVD sale I mentioned earlier, by genre, actors, director, and such things?