What shoppers need beyond a product photo

On a showroom floor, a sofa is the start of a conversation. A customer stops at one piece and the talk moves to the rest of the room: what sits beside it, what goes underneath, what light it needs.

The floor itself was the argument. A shopper could walk into the finished idea and see it resolved before deciding anything.

Online, catalogs got deeper, search got faster and photography got very good. By almost every measure a retailer tracks, buying furniture got easier.

One thing did not survive the move. The room came apart into product pages, each item photographed alone, priced alone and judged alone, and the work of assembling it moved to the customer.

Retailers stock rooms. Customers imagine rooms. Websites transact products.

The Room Gap is the distance between the room-level decision a customer is making and the product-level experience the website provides.

Putting the room back on the retailer own site: the shopper space measured, coordinated pieces drawn from stock actually held, and a reason attached to each one.

The aim is a room that looks composed, not a longer list of suggestions.