How do you know a competitor's dropped feature actually failed?

Linda Bustos came on Live with Intelligems recently. She runs ecomideas.com, a database of over a thousand of the boldest, weirdest, "I can't believe they shipped this" design patterns in ecommerce. The kind of thing you screenshot and drop in a Slack channel.

Here's the idea worth putting in front of this group. A lot of the boldest patterns she's archived don't last. The animated PDP gets stripped back to text. The stepped cart cross-sell gets reverted to a simple PDP upsell. And when we see that as testers, we fill in the story ourselves: it lost the test, so they killed it. But how would we actually know?

Linda's point is that conversion is usually not the reason. Sometimes the creative team turned over and nobody understood the feature. Sometimes it's a performance or accessibility cost. Sometimes a replatform is coming and nobody wants to rebuild it. Sometimes engagement was low and it quietly got dropped. The feature disappearing tells you almost nothing about whether it worked.

That cuts both ways. When a competitor ships something bold, you can't assume it's winning either. Which is her whole case for treating other brands as inspiration, not instruction. A pattern that's a founder-endorsed winner for a tight hero-product catalog, like True Classic switching product types right on the PDP, might fall apart on a 30,000-SKU store. Same idea, different catalog, opposite result.

So the skill isn't spotting the clever idea. It's knowing which one is worth a test slot on your store, and testing it instead of reading a competitor's roadmap off their live site.

The full interview is attached below if you want to watch the whole conversation.

Curious how this community handles it. When you see a competitor kill a feature you liked, do you read anything into it or ignore it? How do you decide a hot idea from another brand earns the test slot on your own site? And has a pattern ever crushed it for a brand you admired and then flopped when you tried it?

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How do you know a competitor's dropped feature actually failed?

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