What are Beta products? In short, an awesome idea.

The long answer?

Every once in a while, we’ll come up with a brilliant idea. It’s an idea so good, that we simply have to tell someone. Now, we know nobody really reads this blog, so I bet this doesn’t count, but here it goes any way.

About nine months ago, we realised that a large portion of our new products don’t ever reach our front page. The reason for this is simple - we were getting more new products every month than we could add to the site completely. Now, with a bigger team we can add more products now than we could before, but there’s still a lag between a product becoming available, and that product being properly added onto the site. A lag during which you previously couldn’t purchase that product!

There is no easy way to fix this problem, unfortunately. We can add more products more quickly, but there will always be a certain amount of time to add the huge volume of new products launched every month. (Tech is a dynamic industry. Freak, I knew we should have sold antique furniture instead!) So, we did the next best thing. We created a category (called Beta Products), where we imported all our newly created products into. This puts these products available to be purchased the moment they become available, before we have a chance to add them to the site will full information, and often before the products are even in stock.

There are some obvious problems with this method.

1. The products have only very limited information loaded. No images, URL, or description. Just a name (often cut off), a price and a short, incomplete description. And even worse, there is the occasional error in this information - no-one from our team has vetted it yet.
2. The products in here are not listed elsewhere on the site, so a processor in this category, would not be listed under Processors too. This means, the only way to find a Beta Product, is to:
   1. Use the Search functionality on our site
   2. Browse the category - not really an option, since there are, at this point in time, just shy of 4000 products in this category!

However, we decided we could live with these shortcomings. Some information is better than no information, and only being able to find a product via search and not in a category is better than not being able to find it all! Furthermore, the type of customer who wants the cutting edge, just announced yesterday, slightly esoteric product has generally done a crazy amount of research! Finally, we have a notice on each Beta Product explaining to our customers about the system, so that a new customer arriving at our site from a search engine doesn’t assume we just don’t add information for our products.

Please feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments. As always, we’d love to hear from you!