The Best Free Sample Is a Sample of the Problem

Software companies win customers by giving away a taste of the product, but you can’t hand out a sample of a showerhead, dog food or lawn fertilizer. The smartest eCommerce brands give away a taste of the problem instead: you type in a zip code or paste an ingredient list, and they hand back real information about your water, your dog’s dinner or your lawn. Jolie, Watts and Sunday each do it from a different spot on the site, and all three leave you convinced of the problem before anyone mentions the product.

Nobody wakes up wanting a filtered showerhead. It’s a $148 chrome fixture that replaces another chrome fixture you already own and haven’t thought about since you moved in, which makes it one of the harder products to write a homepage for.

Jolie doesn’t lead with a pitch for it. Scroll once on their homepage and you’re asked what’s really in your water and given a single field to fill in: your zip code. So I typed one in.

What came back was a page that greeted me by name and listed ten contaminants reported in that zip code’s water supply, each one set against a health guideline, with the gap between the two printed in red. The first row on the list was more than 2,000 times over its guideline.

A minute earlier the showerhead had been a hard sell, and now it felt like the obvious next step, even though nothing about the product had changed. What changed was what I knew about the water coming out of it.

A Free Sample of the Problem

Software companies worked this out years ago. If you want people to try your social media tool, you give them a free LinkedIn post generator, and the free tool works as a taste of the product itself.

That’s a neat trick when your product is software, but you can’t hand out a taste of a showerhead, or of dog nutrition, or of lawn fertilizer.

So the smart eCommerce brands hand out something else instead, which is a taste of the problem itself.

The exchange is simple. You give the brand one small detail from your life, and it gives you back an answer about your water, your dog’s dinner or your lawn. That answer is useful even if you never buy a thing, and it also happens to make the product make sense. Here are three brands doing it, each from a different spot on the site.

Jolie: The Tool is the Pitch

Jolie’s pitch is about beauty, not plumbing. The homepage opens with “Beauty starts with clean water”, and the promise behind the showerhead is better skin and hair: less shedding, less frizz, color that lasts, calmer skin. It’s an appealing promise, but it’s also the kind of promise every beauty brand makes, and on its own it gives you little reason to believe that your water is the thing standing between you and a good hair day.

The Water Report is what makes that promise believable, and it gets there through two design decisions. The first is the input. Rather than handing you a form, the site gives you a sentence to finish, “I live in” followed by a blank, so that entering your zip code feels less like submitting data and more like answering a question someone just asked you.

The second is the output. The report could easily have been a spreadsheet, and there is a table in it, but it comes wrapped in hand-painted watercolor illustrations, and a small diagram of your water’s journey from the source to your skin. The table itself draws on publicly available municipal data and sets every contaminant against the Environmental Working Group’s health guideline, so you’re never left wondering whether a number is good or bad. Only at the very bottom, under “What this means for your hair & skin”, does the showerhead appear.

Notice the order of things. Jolie could have filled the top of the page with product shots and five-star reviews, and those are there too, further down, but first the claim about your skin and hair gets backed up with information about your own tap. The pitch tells you filtered water is better for you, and the report shows you what you’ve been showering in. By the time you reach the product grid, the argument has stopped being a claim Jolie makes about its showerhead and become a conclusion you’ve reached yourself.

More about Jolie’s website ecommerce UX review

Watts: The Tool is the Magnet

The Watts Ingredient Analyzer asks for the ingredient list printed on the bag that’s already in your kitchen, whichever brand it is, and explains every ingredient in plain English: what it is, why manufacturers use it, and whether it counts as nutrition or filler.

What I like most is what the tool leaves out. It never asks you to look at Watts, because its whole job is to help you read a label that almost nobody can read, on a product Watts didn’t make. Only after that does it offer to email you the fuller picture of what your dog’s food is missing.

It also doesn’t live on the store. You’ll find it on the next to the brand’s learning hub, which tells you this tool was built to make friends long before it closes a sale.

More about Watts’ website ecommerce UX review

Sunday: The Tool is the Front Door

Sunday sells lawn care by subscription, and at first glance it’s running Jolie’s play again, with a zip code going in and information about your own home coming out. The difference is in what gets personalized. Jolie sells the same showerhead to everyone and personalizes the evidence for it, whereas Sunday personalizes the product itself: a plan and an application schedule built around what the soil in your particular yard needs, with the right products shipped to your door at the right time. That raises the stakes for the tool, because every bag of fertilizer on the shelf claims to know what your grass needs, and a brand that promises a plan made just for you has to show that it actually looked.

Sunday proves it before it asks you for anything, and it doesn’t make you go looking for the tool either. Where Jolie waits until the second fold, Sunday makes the zip code field the first thing you see on the page. Once I’d typed one in, the first screen showed me a map with 192 Sunday yards nearby, along with a cheerful reminder that my yard isn’t the same as my neighbor’s. The next screen was titled “What your zip code can tell us”, and it turned out to be quite a lot: the type of grass that grows there, the acidity of the soil, and charts of rainfall, temperature and growth potential across the year. Below that came a predicted soil analysis, built from the results of my 15 closest neighbors and, according to Sunday, data from more than 100,000 lawns. The company has described using machine learning to build its plans, and this is where you can see that work on the screen.

Only then did the questions start, about what matters to me, how much I know about lawn care, etc. On paper that’s a quiz, but it lands very differently when it comes after the answer rather than before it. By that point Sunday had already shown me what it knows, so I was only filling in the few things a zip code can’t see, and the plan that followed, complete with a price and a box of products, read as the conclusion of an investigation I had just watched.

This is Not A Quiz

You know the other version of this, the one that says “Take our quiz to find your perfect routine!” and then walks you through a string of questions about yourself before landing on a product. A quiz is a sales conversation in which the customer does all the work.

These tools flip that arrangement. You hand over one detail from your world, the brand does the work, and what comes back is information rather than a recommendation: what’s in the water, what’s in the bowl, what’s under the grass. The recommendation follows eventually, of course, but you’d be glad you asked even if it never did.

A quiz is something you take once, whereas a label is something you read every time you switch food, try a new treat, or stand in the pet aisle wondering. A zip code gets checked again when you move, or when your sister starts complaining about her hair in the new apartment.

The results also travel well, because they’re about things we share. My water is my neighbors’ water, and my dog’s kibble is sitting in plenty of other bowls. That’s why “check your zip” is a message people actually send each other, while “take this brand’s quiz” almost never is.

The Bottom Line

Your product page answers “why this product?”, but these tools answer the question that comes before it, which is “do I even have a problem?”, and when you answer that one with the customer’s own data, they walk to the product on their own.

Building a tool like this used to take a data team, and with AI doing much of the heavy lifting it no longer does, so the hard part now is knowing what to build.

Three questions will get you most of the way there:

1. What does your customer wonder about before buying that doesn’t mention your product
2. What information answers it?
3. What can they type in ten seconds?

If you can answer all three, congratulations, you have a tool worth building.

If you found this article useful, there’s plenty more where it came from. On the Dee2See blog I write about eCommerce UX and conversion using real stores, real screenshots and real opinions, so come over and see what else your store could be doing.

The Best Free Sample Is a Sample of the Problem was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.