Post
by butte » Sun Oct 20, 2013 5:19 am
I don't know which is worse. When I occasionally buy fasteners I expect to see them grouped, of course, and to wind my way through subchoices, so if the sea of subnumbers hides the sea of numbers I become grumpy (gotta couple the shaft lengths, diameters, and thread pitches with . . . argh, nuts, too, plus various metal, nylon, and other washers). Often enough I ignore the numbers and do it by eye with a final test of nut onto shaft. Doing that on-line would have the advantage that staff would be less likely than customers in a walk-in store are to mix stock into wrong bins. Same deal with integrated circuits (one transistor type, highly specialized, 30 makers, even suppliers booboo by the time they're delivered and in hand). What I see in your picture I could deal with happily.
One way would be to set each essential fastener option (combined shaft and nut size and thread options, sitting in one box or bin of shafts, one box or bin of nuts) as a product, with subcategories to nest them under a higher-level product number given to . . . their subcategory. A step up, an inclusive subcategory for kind of metal (steel, brass, aluminum, etc.). Above that a parent category for Hex, Allen, Button. There's also a limit in customer burnout/timeout -- before "customer go boom."
That could be kept to a dull roar by providing a numbered, fairly detailed table with choices having subnumbered, explicit choices, along with a dropdown box for the subnumber plucked from the table.
Much the same holds for automotive bulbs, etc., and for electronics components.
Extensions designed for fasteners, bulbs, components, anything with that sort of proliferation, would have the same sorts of approaches.