Why so many consumers are sick and tired of online shopping [Video]

Last Christmas, my partner’s parents made an extremely generous offer: We’d been sleeping on a luxuriously cooling, king-size Zinus mattress whenever we visited, and they asked whether we wanted one of our own. The only thing we needed to do was pick a bed frame. Easy, right?

Our first thought was to head to Ikea and purchase our current bed frame in a bigger size, but it was out of stock, so we turned to the internet. Searching “wooden bedframe” on the furniture e-commerce store Wayfair, whose tagline is “every style, every home,” yielded over 13,000 results. Amazon gave us a smaller but not particularly more manageable 6,000, with sponsored or “trending” bed frames that weren’t in our price range — or made of wood at all — frequently front-loaded. The task was daunting.

We spent hours at a time clicking between product pages and toggling between search parameters, but none of the options ever lined up. Eventually, buying a new …