Idea for a website to help buying shoes

Your google form doesn't seem to ask enough questions to get a full idea of the fit of the shoe. It's hard to accurately describe the fit of a shoe with only four questions. E.g. the Mad Rock Shark 2.0 on my foot fits the heel great, somewhat loose in the midfoot/arch area and then is too wide in the toes. My toes reach the end of the shoe but the toebox is too wide. I don't know how to communicate that precisely in your form.

Maybe combined with a system where users could submit a foot tracing with a scale on the same page, it would be possible to analyze foot shape with an algorithm and then combined with a questionnaire you would have pretty good data that would allow users to find shoes that fit based on what they've tried on.

You'd need a lot of test feet though, I would think.

Allowing comments on the fit would be helpful I think.

For my Anasazi VCS I would have added that though they fit me perfectly heel tension is very tight into the achilles and can be annoying/uncomfortable

I also did not submit my La Sportiva shoes I have tried because I would have to comment that though they seem to fit, climbing in them just does not work out for someone with a 5.10 foot.

You could have a chart comparing popular shoe brand(Nike, Adidas, Sanuk, etc.) sizes to specific climbing shoes, or at least the popular shoes size to the general size of climbing shoe makers shoes

I realize this isn't perfect, but I appreciate the feedback. Obviously this will be more helpful to people with more "normal" feet. While we could try to get data on pictures of people's feed and 3D model the inside of shoes, this is something we're planning on putting out in our free time, not a PhD thesis. The response overall has been great and people are still adding responses which is cool. We tried to design a survey that we could fit the data to, the more information we collected on each shoe, the harder it would be to correlate that data meaningfully. Maybe we won't be able to tell you how a particular shoe will fit in all it's vagueries, but we think we should be able to you what size shoe to order. Ultimately though, climbing shoes are specific enough that no one would be able to tell you completely how a specific shoe will fit. There are too many variables. Even with pictures of your feet, there are unaccounted for things like personal preference, flexibility of joints, strength of tendons, etc, that all go into how your feet fit. We know this won't be perfect, but we hope it will help.

Hey,

Just so you know there is already a fairly successful company in this space.

shoefitr.com/

I sent an email to them a while ago and they are planning at some point to add support for climbing shoes but right now they have focused on running shoes and are expanding.

They are really doing it right not sure what you could do to improve over that.

dang and actually since I last checked it looks like they now support la sportiva shoes. cool

edit: but only their running and hiking shoes. Still no genuine climbing shoes. :(

Well, as an unpdate: I've had a tremendous number of responses, which I really appreciate. I was optimistic but as much as I've tried to tease apart the data, the questions are perhaps subjective enough and coupled with people's subjective nature of how shoes fit, and a lack of enough data for good statistics... It's hard to make any reasonable conclusions about the data. If anyone is interested in looking at the survey responses, let me know and I can email it to you or post them somewhere.

Thanks for indulging me everyone, I guess this is harder than I thought.

RockinOut wrote:You mean like the Shoe Fitr website that allows you to compare shoes by length, width and volume? Click on show me how it fits

I'm in a marketing analysis class right now, all about writing good survey questions and analyzing survey data. I'd be willing to take a look at the data and survey questions, give some input. Trying to get some new shoes for my wife and we've had the problem of different brands fitting her totally differently, so we never know what size to try. PM me and I can give you my email or we can do a dropbox or googledrive or something.