Last weekend, I tried to buy some vitamins. My selection method was pretty simple: for a given price level and ingredients, I prefer a small gelcap to a large capsule. But the design of many bottles prevents you from telling how big the actual pills are. For instance, the bottles are often opaque, and some of them leave a lot of empty space on top of the product (the latter making it impossible to compare based on bottle size and quantity).

The solution here seems obvious: just print an image of the pills on the bottle itself, and clearly mark it as “actual size”. I believe I’ve seen this on over-the-counter drugs like Advil, but never on vitamins. Given how much space is available on the bottle labels for all of these products, I would expect that showing the product at actual size would be a common approach. And since many consumers might be expected to use the product size as a decision factor, adding this information should increase sales for those who have the foresight to provide it.