Cool E-Commerce?

October 3, 2007 12:17 PM

Etsy.com displays products in interesting ways. What are some other unique e-commerce experiences?

Etsy allows visitors to shop by color or view items in reverse chronological order. Maybe not the most usable ways to shop, but certainly unusual and fun.

What are other sites that are thinking outside the box (or breaking it entirely) when it comes to product display, shopping cart and/or user experience?

posted by Work to Live to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Everybody loves the panic shop
posted by adamrice at 12:31 PM on October 3, 2007

Woot is interesting. Only one product per day.
posted by bitdamaged at 1:11 PM on October 3, 2007

Not shopping per se but I always thought Snacksby's method of finding a recipe based on ingredient folksonomy was pretty cool, ie. you list 5 ingredients and it returns recipes that use those ingredients, sorted by X out of 5 ingredients used in the recipe.

I could definitely see something like this applied to shopping where you supply some characteristics and it returns items that have X of Y keywords you input, ie. "shoes", "brown", "laces", "leather".

I should suggest this to Zappos or something.
posted by junesix at 2:10 PM on October 3, 2007

I love NewEgg's search functionality. Their database is really extensive, so you can search for very specific characteristics of whatever it is you're looking for; for instance: All Intel-compatible motherboards with a 775 chipset that support more than 4 GB of RAM, have 7.1 channel audio onboard, and cost less than $200.

When you're shopping for computer gear you usually have some specific requirements, and NewEgg makes narrowing down the search results dead-simple. There's nothing terribly sophisticated about it: they just index the shit out of their inventory.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:32 PM on October 3, 2007