Scott Adams wrote recently about the increasingly poor online shopping experience. Every time you buy anything online you need to register, enter discount codes, work out shipping costs, struggle through endless attempts to sell you extra things you don't want...it's no longer possible to meaningfully comparison shop because every online retailer hides the final price in different ways, and it's already easier to just go to a damned shop.
My own frustration shoping online is with ad retargeting.
Every time I search for anything online now - clothes, a ski chalet, a xmas present - I am pursued across seemingly every website I visit, pretty much forever, by ads exhorting me to buy these things. Usually again. That is, even if I already bought something I get ads from other sites I didn't buy it from that apparently don't know this. So, Criteo et al...here's the thing. Once I have booked a ski chalet with one of the sites I glanced at back in October, the chances of me booking another ski chalet with a different site you happen to have signed up for retargeting aren't high. Once I have bought a coat I am not going to buy a second identical coat, however many times you show me a photo of it. You know that really. You just don't want to include that data in your algorithm, cos you'd be able to sell a lot fewer ads.
It comes back to the delusion of most website owners, that when people are online they are visiting your site. People are not visiting your site. They are on the web. If they don't buy the coat you're selling, it's not because they haven't been chased around the Guardian website by enough photos of the damned thing. It's because they bought another coat from someone else who was a click or two away. Just saying.
(Picture, let's face it, stolen from here)
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