Configurable product ecomm
Out of context: Reply #10
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- vaxorcist0
one more rant....
Years ago, I worked on a team of programmers/designers who made a very complex ordering system in apple's WebObjects, it was complicated and elegant (a rare combination) and very carefully thought out.... we spent a LOT of time figuring out how phone ordering people would take an order and dealt with as many cases as possible, but for political reasons, we weren't allowed to talk to the actual phone reps (huge error!)
SO.... when we had actual customers use our web app,they were too busy to actually spend time customizing things, they just wanted to pick a few things, and like 90% of them wanted one of the top 3 things, the rest of our work was for like less than 10% of users who really wanted to spec like crazy....
We ended up making a new menu system, literally A,B,C or click here for custom options...
The cost-benefit was all backwards, we could have simply coded A,B,C and had a text-field ordering system that handed off to a human who called you back... which is what they wanted anyway, as we didn't figure out till later that the phone reps were the ones handling all the complexity and the customers didn't want to do it themselves at all....