Insights · Home & Garden
We read real home and garden listings, checking one thing: could an AI shopping assistant confidently tell a buyer whether a product would fit their space?
In homewares, the deciding question is almost always the same: will it fit? Will the sofa fit the room, fit through the doorway, suit the space it's meant for. A beautiful piece a buyer isn't sure will fit is a beautiful piece they don't risk buying.
When the measurement lives only in a diagram, it is on the page for a human and absent for an assistant.
A neat dimensions diagram — width, depth and height laid out cleanly — is good human-facing practice. The trouble is that a diagram is a picture. An AI assistant reads a product page as text, and to it, a dimensions image is indistinguishable from no dimensions at all. The information exists; the assistant just can't see it.
For larger items, a second measurement compounds it. Packaged and doorway dimensions answer a question buyers cannot otherwise resolve — whether the item will physically reach the room. Where they are unstated, neither the buyer wondering if a wardrobe will make it up the stairs, nor an assistant trying to recommend it, can determine it. So the assistant hedges, or points the buyer to a listing that states the numbers plainly.
Why this happens
This gap is unusual because it comes from doing something right. A clean dimensions diagram is genuinely good design for a human shopper. But the same choice that helps a person can hide the deciding fact from an assistant — and the more a catalogue leans on diagrams and photos to carry its measurements, the less an assistant can actually work with.
That's why the fix is rarely “add more.” It's “put the numbers in words as well as the picture.” The listing keeps its polish for humans and becomes readable to the assistant that increasingly decides what a shopper sees.
Note the limit of what an assistant can do here. It cannot measure a room, and it cannot infer a doorway. It can only repeat what the listing states — which is why an unstated centimetre is, to it, an unknown one.
What to do about it
Put width, depth and height in the description text — alongside the diagram, not only inside it. It's the deciding “will it fit?” fact.
Add packaged and doorway dimensions for large items. It answers the “will it get into the room?” question before it becomes a return.
Back the size name with the actual centimetres for soft goods. “King” and “Euro” vary by brand; an assistant needs the cm to match a buyer's space.
State the material and finish in words. Buyers judge quality by material, and it's often the difference between two similar pieces.
Add care and assembly information — flat-pack or assembled, tools, time, how many people. It answers the practical questions that follow “will it fit?”
Name the room and use. “Indoor–outdoor,” “for a compact living room” — plain-language suitability helps the product be found the way buyers actually shop.
Squiggle reads your entire Shopify catalogue and shows you which products hide their deciding details in images — and what to put into words first.
Get my free Store Audit →No software to install. No account required. No obligation.
Squiggle's category guidance is informed by ongoing analysis of publicly available ecommerce product information. Illustrative examples explain common product-understanding principles and do not represent findings from any one merchant or the entire category. No individual store is named. Public catalogue data only — no account access, sales data, or private information was used.