Comment by leobg
3 years ago
That Amazon sucks at finding what you‘re looking for is perhaps not a bug, but a feature. Many here on HN have the engineer‘s mindset where shopping for an item is just solving a problem. But perhaps, for most people, online shopping is something different altogether. Perhaps the a sizable majority of people actually enjoy „hunting“ for a good deal. They, perhaps, enjoy getting „inspirations“ along the way. So Amazon, through testing, might find that making search very fuzzy and even customer reviews not very reliable to actually boost sales.
In an ideal world, I‘d like Amazon to filter fake reviews, weigh the rating of products with hundreds of reviews higher than those with just a handful of reviews, and give me filters to exclude words, search by strings, block particular brands, sort not only by price but by price per unit, and so on. I used to think that Amazon was just lazy in not implementing these things. But I now suspect that the real reason is that they‘ve found that most people do not want to shop like that. For them, shopping perhaps is much less about mere „procurement“ than about gamification, the thrill of the hunt, and entertainment.
I believe it's not about customer enjoyment, it's about profits. If a customer spends more time on the website, they might buy more stuff they don't even need.
It's the same reason why you have to waltz to the back of every supermarket to buy essential items, walk back to the front, and look at individually packaged, overpriced snacks for several minutes while waiting in line at the register.