Possible shopping question: "Where can I get gear like this?"

Question

As I know Stack Exchange generally frowns on "shopping questions", I wanted to ask about this here on Meta before posting it on Main.

I own a piece of gear (a hat) and I would like to buy another one similar to it, but I have not been able to find one. I would like to ask the community if anyone knows of a similar item currently on the market.

Would such a question be acceptable? Is there anything in particular that I should include or avoid?

I would include a description and picture of the item I'm trying to replace. I'm not really looking for general suggestions on what to buy, though if someone has experience with a similar product that would of course be useful. It would be useful for answers suggesting a product to include information about where I could buy it, but price shopping is not the focus of my question.

Answer 1

If you were in search of a specific piece of equipment to solve a problem (i.e. does this <thing> exist? or something similar?), then it would probably make it good Q&A. But since you are essentially asking if anyone's seen a hat similar to yours, it's a tougher sell. Since you're really just looking for a place where you can buy something, perhaps in this case it is better brought to a chat room rather than becoming the canon of this Q&A.

But let's be careful about making this about "shopping recommendations." The Let's go Shopping blog post was designed to keep a site from becoming an endless buying guide — countless users asking "Which camera is best?"

But that cautionary advice has often been completely overblown, and now the mere mention of "I need to purchase" can take a perfectly legitimate question and get it closed. And that is a shame.

Gear talk is usually the mainstay of any half-way decent outdoors site. Let's not lose sight of that. I wish there was more of it on this site.