Item Thumbnail Arrangement

client fails to regard limitations of the logic

[jdnnj]

There's this ecommerce site I created a while ago and all the item thumbnails nicely flow on the page thanks to CSS. The number of items in each row is not fixed and flows to the width of the user's screen. In my opinion this makes very efficient use of screen real estate and therefore maximizes the number of items someone can see at one time.
Well lately on two other sites two people who are basically computer illiterate fail to appreciate the elegance of this solution.
A-<i>The number of items much be the same on each row.</i>
Sorry that is unreasonable and only possible if that category has an even number of items. The say that they understand and then when an item is added or removed from the store there an "emergency". This person calls the IT guy at 6 on Friday to say that there's a major problem with the ____ site that the last row only has one item! I have tried to help explain this and they just don't want to accept the fact that they just don't grasp how this sort of thing should work.
B-<i>If a category only has two items then they must have larger thumbnails or centered, they look too "lonely".</i>
I really just plain don't know how or why to solve this "problem" except that there shouldn't be a separate category for just two items. The company won this award and they have two special items to promote this and they insist on these items having their own special category. My point is that categories should be created with the intent of allowing the users to find items easily, not so much as a marketing tool. The one item is already a large image featured on the home page, so it is unlikely that the site's visitors will miss that item.
I usually am pretty good at simplifying explanations for things like this, but I am just stumped on a definitive reasoning behind why I have done things the way I've done them—the correct way as I see it.

[Beagle]

Are these two people responsible in any way for your income? If not, I wouldn't spend too much time trying to figure out how to explain it to them. If they are, you have my sympathy. ("Lonely"?)

[JollyK]

Well, a couple of things. First, you might look at a big and popular ecommerce site that is successful, and find one that does it the way you do it. Saying, "Amazon is a multi-million-dollar operation, and this is how they do it because no matter the browser, people get to see the most things possible" can be quite effective. (Okay, maybe not Amazon, but you get the gist.)

Second, if they're upset because the third row only has one thing in it (or similar), asking them questions such as "Are you really saying that you don't want to show this product to a customer just because it's the only one in the row? What if that was the one they wanted to buy? You could be LOSING SALES because you didn't want an item to look LONELY!"

(If possible, go back to "Amazon.com doesn't care if a product looks lonely! That's why they're a million-dollar business!")

In short, "You could lose sales" is a good one.

On the other hand, if they're insistent, change the code and charge them, but as follows:

A-The number of items much be the same on each row.

I'd ask them how many items they want on each row, make it a fixed width number, and ask them which ones they want to leave out if there are more items than a multiple of X. Like, if they only want three per row, make sure they know they are going to lose sales on the 10th item in the category.

I might also make them sign a notice to that effect, or they'll come back and say "Our speckled purple widget doesn't show up in the purple category!" At which time you can show them the notice they signed, and say, "Yes, that's correct. It's the 10th item on the list. You asked for it to work that way: see, right here." When customers insist on things that I know they're going to complain about later, I get it in writing: always, always, always. Then, any changes are definitely chargeable.

I'd probably show them how their "3 items per row" looks on a high-resolution screen, also, so they can see how much better it would look the way it currently is.

B-If a category only has two items then they must have larger thumbnails or centered, they look too "lonely".

Again: if they're willing to pay for it, I'd write the code to do it. Add a bigger thumbnail and code in:

if(category_members <= 2){
do this centered big thumbnail thing;
}

I would estimate how long to make these changes, triple it, and demand half in advance, as demands like this trip my "customer is going to be nit-picky and use up a lot of time for a simple task" flag.

But in general, "You will lose sales" is generally a good wakeup call. :-)

JK