The layout of sandals within groups makes no sense. It's likely random, but I can't help but look for a pattern - are they arranged by color, price? Nope.
The typical "online store" has such a long and boring history on the web.
I think it's amazing how little we can see past our metaphors - that our web pages are so much like our paper pages and web sites like magazines. I wonder how big a part of it is language... how long was it before horseless carriages became cars?
give me a way to apply filters to it (like only show what's currently in stock, let me filter by available sizes and widths), and I might find it useful.
this seems like a fun way to drill down into categories and sub-categories, but I don't think it's enough to get someone all the way to product selection and purchase.
Nice idea. Needs work at the more zoomed in levels. I looked at hiking boots, and saw a bunch of little pictures of boots, but having to mouse over each of them to find anything out about them is inconvenient. It should probably automatically display more information (sort of like what you would see in a brick and mortar store), even if that means fewer items could fit on a screen. Maybe you could have the most popular items at one zoom level and show more if the user zooms in more.
Also, I would probably try to include more information
It's also seriously buggy at this point, with half of the items "not available" and lots of prices in the pictures not matching prices in the mousever. Is this an Amazon ECS problem? I toyed with an application using it a few years ago and found that it was buggy as hell, giving info that didn't match their actual website, among other problems. I was wondering at the time whether it wouldn't be better just to scrape their HTML and not bother with their API.
This is awesome. Try browsing for something using this and it actually works — you get an experience similar to a real store where you visually scan and select the things you like. This is seriously impressive. Sure, needs a bit of polish, but I think this is much better than browsing a list of links.
The idea is insiprational though. Keep digging.