Not naive at all. Certainly, there are a billion products. Group by things that don't matter in the first analysis, and you probably knock it down one or two orders of magnitude. But the consumer knows what they need - and can tell Google. An educated consumer (can we grant them that) will find trusted review sites. That knocks the list down to like ten! At ten, the burden really shifts to the manufacturer to have a quality web site. This, in my opinion, is where most fail.

I’ll use a recent example of my own. I am in the market for new hardwood floors. Some Googling confirmed my believe that engineered hardwood floors are the best option. A couple of good review sites then told me the features that I should care about. From those I also found six candidate manufacturers.

One of them seemed to have a nice product, but their web site was just awful and had literally no information. You had to download hard-copy PDF to get any info – and good luck there. The others were better. One really stood out in the breadth and depth of information provided.

Friday, I emailed the four that made the short-list asking for more information in the context of my specific project.