Borderline Un-Useable Websites

We should name and shame them.

I've completely forgotten what I was trying to look at yesterday and couldn't get anywhere, but I know it was a Swiss brand of some kind.

Agree, there are some atrocious sites out there.

I hate manufacturer websites. They are terrible and usually the images are non representative and even the specs sometimes can't be trusted. I don't think they can be saved.

There are some things that are a no-go. Saphire crystal with no A/R coating, a watch over 1K with no on-the-fly adjustable clasp, and a bad website. There have been watch brands I just won't buy/look at because their website is so bad.

Off the top of my head I can't think of a single manufacturer's website I actually enjoy using. Poor navigation. Endless scrolling for artsy nonsense. Missing information. Incorrect information. No prices.

It goes on and on.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I just don't understand it. The website is how you interact with most of your customers. I would put a priority on it being as good of an experience as possible. Think of something like the experience you get from a Rolex AD but put that in your website.

Agreed, there are a TON of offenders in this category. Too many to name.

On the other hand, I was impressed with Tag's website recently. When you pull up a model you can use the mouse cursor to click the pushers and the image of the watch will animate accordingly. Pretty cool.

Which ones do you have in mind? I’m a digital product designer, might do a community service by offering them a better designed site

I can mention one, which is a fantastic brand but in need of a website upgrade: Sinn.

If the website is bad to the point of unusable can you really trust them to have the level of attention to detail that is needed to produce a great watch?

Sinn, Omega, off the top of my head

Yes! That and listing barely any specs or not having many pics. Like someone's gonna drop thousands and not even know what the bracelet looks like or what the lug width is! 🤯

Some of them work fine on a desktop/laptop but utterly crappy on a mobile device.

This is a little off topic, but I do not understand why Sinn only has 1 AD in the US, and it is strictly online. You are talking the largest consumer market in the world, and they only sell online on 1 website.

Blancpain still has the Barakuda listed on their product page. It’s been sold out since 2019.

I know it's not Helmut Sinn's company any more, but he was one of the first watch manufacturers to skip ADs, selling directly to consumers. Back in the day that meant that you could travel to Frankfurt (one of the largest airport hubs in Europe) to pick up your watch at his workshop and have the case back scratched with his signature if you wanted. He was born in 1916 and a former pilot who started making watches for fellow pilots. Germany in general is slow in its digital transformation. All this may help to explain why the Sinn website is such a PITA. Although it seems to be improving. I remember that a few months ago you needed even more clicks to find the price of a specific model.

And yes I find it frustrating that some high street mainstream brands have little unboxing coverage on YouTube so you can't get real visuals or accurate measurements. Whereas AliExpress watches are well catered for in this regards.

The main offense that I run into is sites that immediately want you to choose between their collections. I don't even know what these collections mean! If I can't just filter by case size (or some other simple variable) I lose patience quickly.

This is extra perturbing when you are hunting down something you've seen and they inexplicably have similar watches in different collections based on a different band or case material or other minor variation. It's like they are deliberately collecting clicks instead of sales.

Keep in mind that the swiss watch industry up to the year of our lord 2020 had really no comprehension of online sale at all.

They wouldn't even tell you what their products cost on their website and were basically incapable of even thinking about selling their products online.

Only when they had to switch to selling online because of very sensible political decisions they were all like:

When they realized that, yes, people actually do spend money online. What a shock.

This is the same industry that commited suicide in the 70s because no way people would rather buy cheap precise quartz watches than expensive, inacurate, delicate, mechanical ones...

I think there are three kinds of bad websites selling watches:

a) the over-designed ones which put looks over functionality (typically from the big brands)

b) the under-designed ones which look and feel like left overs from the nineties, usually from microbrands that cannot put any money into it (e.g. Aragon or H2O)

c) the total mess, e.g. AliExpress

Sinn have watches from the future and a web site from the 90’s

Baume & Mercier has a sensible but sleek website imo