Spread eight / Left leaf / A question about the listing
The ranges listed and how each is described
A description is a promise about an object somebody cannot pick up. Writing one is the most consequential thing that happens at this desk.
“Is the handle on this the same as the one in the second picture? And when you say large is that large for the shelf or large generally, I’ve got 28 cm to play with.”
Two questions, and the second one is an indictment. The customer has 28 centimetres and the listing has an adjective. Every minute spent answering that question by message is a minute that the description should have saved, and every customer who does not ask it orders anyway and finds out at home — which is a return, a grade, an adjustment and a refund for something that was never wrong.
So the first line of every description here is a measurement. Not the brand, not an adjective, not what it is good for. The number, in millimetres, taken off the thing itself.
Spread eight / Right leaf / Building a description
The order a description is written in
- What it is, in the words somebody would use to search for it. One noun, one qualifier, no invented category names.
- Measurements, in millimetres, in the order height, width, depth, taken with a steel rule at the bench. Where a dimension varies, the one that matters for fit is given and said to be the one that matters.
- Mass, from the bench scale, because mass decides whether one person can carry it.
- Material and finish, named rather than described. A material has a name; a finish is what you can see.
- What is in the pack — the count, and whether fixings are included, which is the single most common reason for a message after delivery.
- Care, where there is any, in the maker’s terms rather than ours.
- What it does not do, where there is an obvious expectation it will not meet. This is the shortest section and the one that prevents the most returns.
Photographs follow the same rule: one of the whole object against a plain ground, one of whatever the measurement in the first line refers to, and one of the pack as it arrives.
A photograph of the object in use is a photograph of somebody else’s room, and it tells a customer nothing about fit. The field that prevents most returns is the last one in the stack, which is also the one most listings leave out.
Right leaf / The ranges
What is held, in categories
The floor is organised by how things are picked and packed rather than by what they are for, so the categories are plain ones:
| Range | What picking it involves |
|---|---|
| Storage and organisation | Bulky, light, nests or stacks. Picked from the face, usually the largest box on the order and therefore the box everything else goes into |
| Small kitchen equipment | Dense, boxed, often fragile at one point only. Picked with the pack intact and never unpacked to check — the pack is the protection |
| Household textiles | Compressible and dirt-sensitive. Bagged before it goes in the box, every time, because a textile against a corrugated wall marks |
| Garden and outdoor hand tools | Long, awkward, sometimes sharp. Edges sleeved at the bay, not at the bench, so that nothing travels across the floor unsleeved |
| Stationery and office sundries | Small, high line count, many lines to one order. The range most likely to need two aisles for one line |
| Pet sundries | Mixed density, some of it scented strongly enough to carry. Never packed against textiles |
No range is listed before a sample of it has been through the bench and measured. A listing written from a supplier’s own sheet is a listing nobody here has checked, and the first person to discover the sheet was wrong will be a customer.
Right leaf / The limits of a description
What a description here will not say
Three refusals, and the reason for all three is the same: a listing is read by somebody who cannot pick the object up.
- No claim
Nothing that cannot be shown at the bench with a rule or a scale.
- No comparison
Against something not sold here, which nobody can check against anything.
- No superlative
Standing in for a figure. An unknown number is left out, not estimated.
Where a customer asks for a number that is not on the listing it is measured and then added to the listing, because if one person needed it the listing was short a line.
The same rule governs the pictures: nothing retouched beyond straightening and white balance. A colour that has been improved is a return waiting to be graded.