WrenchScience — http://www.wrenchscience.com/ — have an extensive system to ensure a good fit on different kinds of bicycles.

NetSmoking — http://www.netsmoking.dk/ — lets you order a smoking with accessories. (In danish, but you should be able to get the idea.)

No flash or animations. Just step by step measurements.

But this is really way better that just ordering eg. a pair of pants in ‘Large’ and hope they will fit.

http://www.hammacher.com/online_catalog/catalog_landing_page.asp

It’s probably THE best example I’ve seen of transitioning users from print to the web.

I don’t know if this is related to your thesis, but seeing this for the first time was one of those moments where all I could do was sit back and stare in amazement.

–Sorry if i was not clear. Basically if free riding became an epedemic service retailers would go out of business and high end suppliers would have less possible customers expereincing the supperiority of their products first hand. Thus high end suppliers control this by allowing only small amounts of their products to be sold online which ups the demand and the price respectively. Hope I cleared it up! Good luck on the project!

The site is slow, ugly and lacks a DOCTYPE, accessibility considerations etc, but all of those things are fairly common to Websphere sites (from those I’ve seen). I don’t know how many people use it to the fullest extent, but I can see that people would at least pick the mods they want then get their personalised printout. I’ll never be able to afford one, but it is nice to dream

Holden used to have a much better one which allowed you to manipulate the vehicles by changing the wheels, the viewing angle, colours, trim, body kit, mods etc but that seems to be limited to a membership option since their last redesign because I can’t find it anymore. They have some lame “Configurator” instead that doesn’t even come close to comparing, but the original was very similiar to the NikeID site in terms of ease-of-use and quality. Speaking of which, I love it and I want my shoes. But as usual such things are limited to the US

I think that would be an important strategy for online sales via interaction. The main consumers that I see initially are the geeks. Techfreaks and webheads are comfortable online, so they are far more likely to purchase; especially through the kind of gimmicky systems that currently exist. As the systems improve, of course, such behaviour may become more mainstream, but offering international service strikes me as important from the start. After all, I know that I’ll never go back to that Nike site (unless for conceptual stuff relating to my work), because it is no use to me directly (being an Aussie)

Keep those ideas and examples coming. This is very inspirational, not to mention useful. Also, please include your thoughts about the example. If you think it’s any good, bad or the things you think they fail miserably at (usability.)

Good luck.

Here’s an example for you. It is a furniture company here in the Boston area. Not top of the line, but they have this surprising feature where you can try out different plans for furnishing your house:

http://www.jordansfurniture.com/roomplanner.asp