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.
The measurement that answers it was frequently on the page — as an image an assistant couldn't read.
This is the pattern that stood out. Many listings had followed good human-facing practice: a neat dimensions diagram, width and depth and height laid out cleanly. 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 gap compounded it: packaged and doorway dimensions were rarely stated anywhere. A buyer wondering whether a wardrobe will make it up the stairs has no way to find out — and neither does an assistant trying to recommend it with confidence. So it hedges, or points the buyer to a listing that states the numbers plainly.
Why this happens
This gap is unusual because it often 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.
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.
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This finding is based on Squiggle's own reading of public home and garden product listings. It describes a pattern observed across the listings we checked, not a claim about the homewares industry as a whole, and no individual store is named. Public catalogue data only — no account access, sales data, or private information was used.