Online vacuum cleaner buying experience
From 10:04am to 11:43am today (thanks Google Web History), I scoured the Internet looking for vacuum cleaners with my credit card close at hand, intending to buy immediately. Our 15-yr old Hoover had just aspirated and shattered a mint-flavored Chap Stick and it was getting well past time for it to be replaced.
Here’s how I ended up purchasing a vacuum cleaner today: I went to a local dealer who doesn’t even have a website and paid him just over $200 in cash for a brand new Sanitaire upright, including the trade-in for my old Hoover (that’s right, he doesn’t accept credit cards).
What a colossal failure of all this fancy e-commerce technology we have today. I shopped Amazon. I Googled vacuum cleaners and clicked through product search results. I did Shopping.com, and read about bagless cyclone technology and HEPA filters on Wikipedia. I probably clicked a dozen AdWords links and cost the small, independent dealers promoting them many dollars in ad spend. I went to the corporate sites of Electrolux, Dyson and several others. I tried the latest social shopping experience at ThisNext. JCPenney offered me a vacuum, and so did Thinkvacuums.com and Vacshack.com and Totalvac.com and Allergy Be Gone and Vacdepot.com. Consumer Reports tried to get me to pay them a subscription to learn more about vacuum cleaners.
I wasn’t even shopping for the cheapest price. I’m generally a premium buyer and there was roughly a $300 budget burning a hole in my pocket waiting to be captured by someone, anyone who could just meet these simple criteria:
- upright, floors and carpet brush
- relatively lightweight
- durable, quality construction
- decent value for money vs. competition
- no stupid extra features that I don’t need
Every single one of these sites failed that simple test. Check this out as just one example. What the hell am I supposed to make of that? Seven different lines of upright vacuum cleaners with features like “Telescopic Self-Cleaning Duster” and what not. You must be kidding.
For the things I truly care about, like “how much does it weigh?” I had to dig deep into product manuals and technical specifications. I couldn’t find a single comparison shopping site that lets you compare more than a few brands of vacuum cleaners by their curb weight.
Nonetheless, my purchase trail does trace through the Internet, just not in the way all these e-commerce sites would wish. I discovered Central Vacuum Service through the “Find a dealer” zipcode search on the Sanitaire corporate website. (As it turns out, Sanitaire is a division of Electrolux who are also the owners of the ridiculous Eureka site referenced above.)
The store turns out to be a couple blocks from my house, a place I’d probably driven by 300 times already. I could have saved myself a lot of time by just going there first…
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