What are your frustrations when searching for quality clothes online?

[clothesgeek]

Hi,

As the title says, I'm curious to learn about your frustrations when searching (not limited to shopping) for quality clothes online.

For context, I'm a software engineer building a search engine for quality clothing. So far I've been mainly building it around my frustrations when searching for quality clothes online.
I would love to know more about other people's frustrations to possibly address them and also validate/invalidate some of my assumptions about this space.

I will start with some of mine:

• I find it hard to find pieces made with a certain fabric (yak/camel wool for example) or in a certain way/area (European-made double-breasted jacket for example)
• Being bombarded with results from high-luxury brands (LV, Gucci & all) that I'm not interested in whenever I'm looking for quality pieces on quality clothing platforms (Lyst / Mr Porter).
• Being drowned by results from low/mid-quality brands (Zara & all) when not using a dedicated quality clothing platform
• Hard to know about the quality of a product (no comments/reviews) on the product pages
• Lack of non-English results

Thanks !

 

[stylecounsel1]

It depends how complex you want to make it. You could start with simple filters you create yourself. So exclude brands known to be low quality on a blacklist to filter search results.

To be more complex, you could collect statistics on brands that are good and bad quality with frequencies and learn heuristics to then automatically adjust the filter by including or excluding brands according to how they match patterns learned from what is out there. So if an unheard of brand appeared with similar frequencies and on the same websites as white listed brands and had a similar statistic profile it would automatically go on the white list.

I think even a simple manual filter would work well for a start.

I saw a post somewhere where someone manually created some sophisticated search queries for ebay that would find you all the quality stuff. There were a series of links in the post that jumped to ebay's search results for which ever query. It was just a long query with key brands and keywords and things to exclude and it worked very well. You could edit the string with your size, fabric, etc.