Amazon, the online all-in-one, uber efficient retailer has long been a pioneer in online retailing. Now they have gone one step further by allowing people to search their product base ordered not just by price or popularity, but also by colour.
"Say you're looking for a sofa," said head of online development, Rita Taylor. "You can already search for blue, but with the new ordering scheme, you can quickly nip through the colours and see close to blue colours as well as blue. Purple or green go quite nicely with blue. You can mix and match the ordering as well, so price within colour, for instance."
It is not just clothes and furniture than can be ordered by colour. Everything on the site can be ordered by colour.
"It's quite nice to order music or books by colour," said Taylor. "Seeing the kaleidoscopic array of albums or book covers is a pleasing effect."
Amazon have also made it possible to arrange across category by colour, so that those people who want a coffee table book that blends with their sofa and coffee table, or who only want albums that fit with a yellow colour scheme, can quickly and easily locate books and music that fit the criteria.
"Lets face it," said Taylor. "Just about everybody has dozens and dozens of CDs that they have no intention of listening to. And probably twice that ambiguous number in books they have no intention of reading. This new scheme at least makes them match with the decor."
Some album art have multiple colours on them, and these appear in multicoloured and each of the colour on the sleeve. Which for something like Mika's albums, is every colour.
"Some people won't find it that useful," admitted Taylor. "But they'll probably use it anyway, because it can look beautiful, and everybody loves art."