Can we talk about one of my biggest online shopping pet peeves for a moment?

I absolutely cannot stand it when retail sites don’t list a brand’s products by their proper names. Case in point: The Brian Atwood Suede and Metal Heel Platform Pumps, currently available via Saks.com. Brian Atwood names all of his shoes. All of them. Most designers with a significant following do, because that makes it a thousand times easier for fans to track down a select design and to find information about them on the Internet. Naming a shoe only makes sense, from a marketing and sales standpoint.

And Saks surely knows the name of this shoe. Not only was it printed on the box that they received with the photography sample in it, but it’s probably written in a hundred different places in their company records. Why do they insist on keeping it from us, and instead assigning the design a vague, nonspecific name that’s longer, less memorable and less search engine-friendly?

Saks isn’t the only website that commits this crime against shopping, though. No, almost all web retailers are perpetrators from time to time, although Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman tend to be better then most about including a model name in the product’s description, if not its title. Retail managers, if you’re reading this, I implore you: The name of a shoe is important. Don’t you want people to be able to Google these gorgeous heels and be taken straight to your site to order them? Isn’t that the whole point? Buy through Saks for $850.

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