best-price.com: Intruding on the home page

A pop-up window alternative restricts buyer options.

The Site

Best-price.com, a US price comparison shopping site, has a Products of the Hour panel that opens within the home page when it is launched and obscures a large part of the underlying content.

Initially, the home page opens normally to show a mix of tabbed section navigation bar, Categories of Product index and Most Popular Products selection. However, the Products of the Hour panel then begins to edge its way into and across the screen from the right-hand edge. When fully installed it overlays some of the Most Popular Products items, a column of product categories, at least two links on the navigation bar and the ‘What are you looking for?’ Search button (the extent of coverage depends on screen sizing). A ‘Close’ heading attached to the top of the panel allows it to be removed from view.

The Takeaway

Pop-up windows are not the widespread annoyance they once were as site owners have steadily reined in their use as a reaction to rising levels of user annoyance and browsers have enabled users to put their own block on the feature. Perhaps with the latter in mind, best-price.com has come up with a way round the blocks that integrates its promotional Products of the Hour panel as a kind of sliding door alternative to the pop-up window. Quite why it would go to such ingenious lengths to reintroduce the annoyance factor is, like much of the home page content blocked out by the panel, not immediately obvious.

While the panel provides an the up-to-the-hour promotional push that fits in with the sales ethos of the site, its intrusion into other elements of the home page is commercially questionable as it blocks other, arguably more important, channels from immediate access. Users may end up not just irritated but also missing some of the permanent content (Clothing and Video Games categories, for example) or having to work unnecessarily hard to find them.

First published on 12 April, 2007