objects of desire · 3 min read
The 140 products nobody wanted, even for free
Of 3,578 products that have been on the shelf since July, 3,438 have been ordered at least once. The 140 left over share a pattern, and the pattern is embarrassing: they are the sensible ones.
by Arthur
published September 23, 2026
Everything here is free, so the natural question is what a person picks when price is not in the way. The more interesting question is the opposite one: what stays on the shelf anyway. We took the 3,578 products that were already in the catalog on July 6th, matched them against every order in our history, and 140 items came out never having been in anybody's cart, not even once.
The absurd has a queue, the sensible does not
| product | price | units |
|---|---|---|
| top of the line graphics card | US$ 10,370 | 38,465 |
| top of the line Apple laptop | US$ 13,746 | 23,213 |
| 6 pack of Korean face masks | US$ 7.80 | 12,887 |
| mid range graphics card | US$ 1,078 | 0 |
| entry level laptop with an i7 | US$ 1,132 | 0 |
Units added up across every order since June 16th, 2026. Catalog prices converted from reais to dollars using the site's fixed rate. All five products have been on the shelf since before July 6th, so they had the same exposure and the same traffic peak.
The most expensive graphics card in the store was ordered 38,465 times. The mid range card, ten times cheaper and infinitely more reasonable, sits at zero. The same thing happens with laptops: the priciest Apple machine flies off the shelf, while the entry level laptop with an i7, the one an actual person would actually buy, never moved once. And cheap is not the problem: the face mask pack at US$ 7.80 was ordered almost thirteen thousand times.
The forgotten list is a list of useful things
- •A 512 liter frost free fridge, US$ 669.
- •A famous countertop stand mixer, US$ 552.
- •A VR headset with a game included, US$ 523.
- •A 1 TB external SSD, US$ 492.
- •A ceramic hair straightener, US$ 22.
- •A professional hair dryer, US$ 28.
None of them is ugly, overpriced or useless. Every one of them is exactly the sort of thing that ends up on a wedding registry. And that is precisely the problem: nobody opens a fake shopping site to order a hair straightener. Desire without a price tag is not looking for what solves your life, it is looking for what your life does not allow.
Home is the most forgotten category
| category | never ordered | products on the shelf | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| home | 50 | 720 | 6.9% |
| beauty | 38 | 882 | 4.3% |
| tech | 28 | 676 | 4.1% |
| games | 17 | 601 | 2.8% |
| fashion | 7 | 699 | 1.0% |
Only products already in the catalog on 07/06/2026, so that all of them had the same time on the shelf. In total that is 140 forgotten items among 3,578 products, or 3.9%.
Home forgets 6.9% of what it offers and fashion forgets 1%. That tracks: clothes and sneakers are pure desire, while a blender is household logistics. The surprise is beauty, which has the second worst score even though it is the top selling category in several countries. The beauty items nobody orders are all appliances: dryer, straightener, trimmer. What does move is cream, perfume and face masks, meaning what you feel rather than what you plug in.
The product nobody orders here is exactly the product somebody would really buy. Once price steps out of the way, the middle ground disappears with it.
One methodological caveat, because it changes the number: another 3,287 products entered the catalog between July 12th and 19th, and 547 of those have never been ordered, or 16.6%. That looks far worse, but it is only shelf time: they arrived after the traffic peak and had two fewer months to be discovered. That is why this post counts only the ones that were already here at the start of July.