De Morgan Shopping

2
alb_d  posted on  2020-10-27

Instead of filtering for products that have the features you want, filter for products that don't have the features you don't want.

Example:
Say you are buying a used car and say you don't care about new tech like android auto or apple play. Specifically, filter for cars that don't have those techs.
Or maybe you don't care if the car has dents on it. Then specifically search for cars with exterior dents.

Say you are looking to rent an apartment and say the amount of space is not important to you. Add filters on rental sites to only show apartments smaller than a certain area.

Why does this work?
Assuming the market is efficient, you get what you pay for. Which means the total features that can come for a certain price is zero-sum. It is often harder to ascertain what all the good features are since you need to be an expert to do a thorough appraisal. It can be much easier to identify features that you don't care about.
Another reason why this works is that marketing is tuned to amplify the good features and trick buyers by giving an inflated perception. So you need to be meticulous to separate the hype from substance. The negative features(dent etc) don't get polluted by marketing.