When endless online choice means never finding what you want

It hadn’t occurred to me when I started to look for a modest bag to protect a new compact camera that I would be engaging with one of the big social problems of our age. What are we going to do when all the shops are gone?

My starting point when I want to buy something that I won’t be eating or drinking is invariably Amazon. Yes, like many others, I am jointly and personally responsible for the demise of the high street and for degrading the wages and conditions of British retail employees. But the seductive advantage of Amazon is the vast choice it offers. You can always find what you want at a good price.

Or can you?

The most critical feature of the bag I was going to buy was its size – big enough for the camera, small enough to fit a coat pocket. I could specify the range of dimensions precisely. Finding the right case would be easy.

Except that “camera bag” can be interpreted by search engines as anything from the size of a mobile phone to a backpack big enough for all my gear should I make a spur-of-the-moment decision to take up a career as a professional photographer. There are hundreds on offer. And the online giant wants to show me absolutely everything it’s got.

The column of enlargeable illustrations should help. But there’s the famous small-bag-close-at-hand-or-big-bag-far-away problem. This means clicking on each advertised product in turn to look at the text description. I could skip past the first few models knowing they won’t be relevant because Amazon has been paid to feature them at the top of their list irrespective of my needs. I click on them all anyway, just in case.

There’s plenty of prominent text listing the virtues of the goods, though for some reason not usually the dimensions. So let’s scroll down past what other people have bought (well that’s handy), past a mass of even more extraneous items that other paying sponsors think I should buy, pausing perhaps to confuse the issue further with what other customers have looked at, and on to the “product details”. It’s the best place to find dimensions, though sizes could be buried even further down the page under another heading, “product description”.

That’s if this information is there at all. I estimated that in at least half of cases it was missing, and that doesn’t include the American products where dimensions, if provided at all, need to be translated from fractions of an inch to millimetres.

After half an hour or so of increasingly tedious exploration I still hadn’t found what I was looking for. I could have driven to a photographic store 10 miles away in the time this was taking, provided online shopping hadn’t driven it out of business.

Reviews are as helpful as complaints about the weather

There were a couple more investigative opportunities I could try. I could read up to 300 customer reviews for each product. Or I could find the time and willpower to “ask a question”. I’ve never actually tried that: evidence suggests that the most common response from eager-to-please fellow shoppers can be paraphrased as, “I’m afraid I can’t answer your question because I bought a different product.”

At a glance I could see that some buyers are not happy with the size of the bag they’ve bought. But as they mostly fail to mention what model or size of camera they were putting in it, their reviews are as helpful as complaints about the weather.

I eventually found a camera case where one of the photos had been annotated to show its height, width and depth. A stunningly clever idea which has eluded the people marketing all the other bags – unless Amazon don’t really want me to know what I’m buying.

At this point my frustration was compounded by a stab of doubt. Did the size details which I had managed to extract refer to internal or external measurements? It’s rare that both are given, though the detail could be critical for the wellbeing of both my camera and my pockets. How could I now be sure of anything?

If you’re still reading, you’ll be howling at me in irritation, “So why didn’t you search for a bag for your particular camera.” I did. Amazon’s search algorithm allows them to announce that virtually any bag is “for” my specific model. So again I’m offered scores of spurious containers from luggage to handbags and even the odd item of furniture and kitchenware.

Changing the balance of control between the seller and the customer

Some which promised to fit my camera turned out to be smaller than the item they had to contain. I presume unlucky purchasers landed with these useless products shrug their shoulders and write off the experience as an inevitable cost of on-line shopping. In fact they’ve been misled and should be demanding their money back.

It may not be immediately apparent, but while online stores are offering convenience and choice they are also drastically changing the balance of control between the seller and the customer. In a store there’s a fair chance I can see what I’m getting, and if it’s not exactly what I want at least I’ll probably be aware of this before I get to the till. The illusion of online shopping nirvana on the other hand involves a magic show of partial information, distraction and sleight of hand.

I suspect that my experience here is just a microcosm of the customer anguish and disappointment which will be obligatory in the not too distant future.

According to the predictions of market experts, our high streets are already doomed to survive only as places for entertainment and quirky niche shops selling expensive “specialities”. But these experts don’t seem to talk much about the downside of the shopping experience itself when most retail goods will be despatched by robots and delivered to our doors by driverless vehicles and drones.

 What if the only real shops left are in remote major cities

What if the inexorable and accelerating desolation of our dwindling local high streets runs its full course? What if the only real shops left with a wide range of goods on display and with human staff are a tiny rump of stores owned by asset stripping retail barons (or, worse, owned by Amazon) in remote major cities? What happens when Amazon and its ilk are effectively the sole providers of everything we buy?

We can’t fundamentally change this future. But we could perhaps ameliorate it if governments had the courage to work together to take on the might of the perpetrators by taxing them appropriately, by regulating their self-interested use of the data that citizens freely provide, and by limiting their insidious trading practices.

Incidentally, I never did find a suitable camera bag on Amazon. But only days later I was ambling through the streets of Worcester with my camera, en route to photograph its impressive cathedral. I spotted a camera shop in a side street with a dozen or so bags on display. I tested a couple, found one that fitted almost immediately, and bought it. It probably cost a few pounds more than I would have paid online. By my reckoning this was money well spent.