Hi soulgiver36,
While other people’s comments about the knowledge and service of a particular business can certainly be very helpful … I would be very cautious about about using other people’s experiences or reviews on a mattress (either positive or negative) as a reliable source of information or guidance about how you will feel on the same mattress or how suitable or how durable a mattress may be for you and in many if not most cases they can be more misleading than helpful because any mattress that would be a perfect choice for one person or even a larger group of people may be completely unsuitable for someone else to sleep on (even if they are in a similar weight range). Reviews in general certainly won’t tell you much if anything about the quality, durability, or “value” of a mattress or how it will “feel” for any particular person (see post #13 here).
If an online mattress has a good return policy then you can try the mattress for yourself with little risk so you can assess whether the mattress is a suitable match for you based on your own personal experience (which may be very different from someone else) and if you find that the mattress you chose doesn’t work out as well as you hoped for then you can return it.
That would depend on the specifics of the mattress and the upholstery materials inside it.
When you sleep on a mattress the upper layers of foam will compress and deflect more than the deeper layers partly because the comfort layers are usually made to be softer than the deeper transition and support layers of a mattress (and firmness/softness is also a factor in the durability of a material) and partly because they are closer to the sleeping surface and subject to direct compression without any layers above them absorbing some of the compression forces first. It’s this constant deflection of the foam materials in the upper layers of the mattress that softens and breaks down the foam and leads to the loss of comfort and support in the mattress. This will also happen more under the heavier parts of the body such as the hips/pelvis than the lighter parts of the body. This is why the quality/durability of the upper layers (the top 3" to 6" of the mattress) are especially important in the durability and useful life of the mattress as a whole because they will usually be the weakest link in the mattress in terms of durability. The quality/durability guidelines that I would generally suggest are in post #4 here.
I would agree that with a local purchase knowing the ILD information for the various layers is mostly meaningless and will generally only add to confusion. With a local purchase, testing for “comfort” and PPP (Posture and alignment, Pressure relief, and your Personal preferences) based on what your body tells you with careful testing is much more reliable than choosing a mattress based on complex combinations of specs that can take many years of experience to understand how they all interact together.
While for some people that have a great deal of experience in the industry or who design mattresses knowing the ILD information of the layers in a mattress can be helpful or even essential for business or design reasons, the ILD of a material is only one of many variables that determines how soft or firm the materials or a mattress “as a whole” that uses it will feel (see here) and ILD numbers are not comparable between different materials or in many cases between different versions of the same material anyway (see post #6 here).
For most people knowing or finding out unnecessary specs can be overwhelming and for those that do know a little bit about foam specs they can often tend to make choices based on specs alone or believe that they know more than they really do (for example making choices based on foam density or ILD alone when these are just two of many variables that can affect the feel and performance of a mattress). Too much information and too little information can both result in poor choices. In many cases mattress manufacturers don’t provide the ILD of their various foam layers because they are well aware of the risk of providing too much information to a customer and understand that for most people it would be more misleading than helpful. While knowing the specs of a mattress that can affect the durability and useful life of a mattress is an important part of making an informed choice … knowing the “comfort specs” of a local mattress isn’t nearly as important as listening to what your body tells you with careful and objective testing.
As I’ve already mentioned in the information I’ve linked in my earlier replies … density is the single biggest factor in the durability and useful life of memory foam and polyfoam but density isn’t directly related to firmness or the “feel” of memory foam. There is more about the different properties that can be formulated into of different types of memory foam in the posts I linked previously (post #9 here and in post #8 here).
In its simplest form … choosing the “best possible” mattress for any particular person really comes down to …
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Careful testing (hopefully using the testing guidelines in the tutorial) to make sure that a mattress is a good match for you in terms of “comfort”, firmness, and PPP (Posture and alignment, Pressure relief, and your Personal preferences) … and/or that you are comfortable with the options you have available to return, exchange, or “fine tune” the mattress and any costs involved if you can’t test a mattress in person or aren’t confident that your mattress is a suitable choice.
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Checking to make sure that there are no lower quality materials or weak links in the mattress that could compromise the durability and useful life of the mattress (see this article and the durability guidelines it links to).
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Comparing your finalists for “value” based on #1 and #2 and all the other parts of your personal value equation that are most important to you.
Phoenix