please don't rotate your products

Please don't rotate your products....

(8 votes)

I don't really want to make a habit of posting rant blogs, but for now I'm just going to bite the bullet and let this one slide. Join me for just a few minutes while I talk about my dislike for rotating product images and 360 degree views on e-commerce site.

[mage]

So I'm sure most people think that 360 product views and image rotation is a great leap forward in e-commerce technology, but really, its just annoying. Let me explain a little.

Here is the deal. As development lead for a new web project I've been tasked with finding and implementing a solution for 360 degree product rotations. Naturally I've seen this technology before, but until now I had been lucky enough to not actually work with it. So anyway, as my first task, I set out to find a standard. I want to know how the best in the business accomplish this feature and what standard they are using.....guess what? Either the best don't use it, or there isn't any sort of standard set for how a product rotation should look, work, feel, function or anything, pretty much everyone that has this functionality accomplishes it differently. The user-interface is pretty much always different, the controls all have their own little quirks that users must learn in order to use the featuer, and the loading time is terrible.

I won't even bother getting into the difficult setup required to get this solution live. To keep it short, lets just say you better have an in-house photographer (which we do) a lot of time, and a big budget. Sure it may be easy to set up a demo with 1 or 2 products, but in a product environment....talk about a real life resource hog.

The only time you'll see any existence of uniform design is when you visit the larger e-commerce websites, and that's because they use one of the big dynamic imaging vendors such as Scene7.

So that's my rant for now. I'm sure some people may love these features, but I don't, and I'm dreading the time I'm going to have to spend with them in the coming months.

Post a comment and let me know what you think.

Travis

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Comments (23)

1. 26-04-2009 23:32

Interesting rant! Allow me to counter-rant.

I think you are being just a bit harsh. Ok... I can agree that there may be a lack of standards in this area of digital media but that situation is improving. Take a look at FSI-Viewer for example (http://www.fsi-viewer.com).

Setup... difficult? What? You've had bad luck! Implementing this kind of media can be very easy indeed. i.e. just insert a flash element into the page. Is that so hard? And, bye the way, using flash is not a "new technology" as you suggest it might be.

Loading times shouldn't be so awful either. Typically you can get a nice 360 product view SWF in at about 600KB (depending on pixel dimensions and number of frames of course). I personally don't think this should be too much of a strain. Consider the bandwidth required to stream even small video clips for example.

You also say that budgets should be big? Well that depends on what you call big. Prices I've seen are coming down to around $40 per product. I wouldn't call that particularly big.

Also, your rant is desperately short of any facts! It kind of sucks.

Written by Paul (Guest)

2. 10-08-2011 16:01

None can doubt the veracity of this atirlce.

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