Comment by moolcool
2 years ago
Using Amazon for shopping is terrible, borderline unusable in 2024. They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have an amazing logistics network, but it also seems like there's a big vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's actually good.
The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
In many categories, even when explicitly searching for brand and model names, you’ll get dozens of off-brand substitutions and even random unrelated products appearing above it in the search results.
Occasionally I’ve even noticed products that are available for sale (if you click on a direct link or have them saved in your favorites etc), but refuse to show up in search results no matter what!
Often it’s easier to find things on Amazon using Google search than using Amazon’s search.
Pro-tip: Amazon fills their page with that useless content from their ad network, just like any standard ad. uBlock Origin blocks all of it, and your search experience is restored to what you expect.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand what people were talking about when they said Amazon's search interface is terrible. People would tell me they search for a specific book or author, and get totally irrelevant results. My experience was totally opposite.
I had to finally see a screenshot from someone's browser to believe it. It turns out uBlock has been blocking this content the whole time, and I never noticed it at all.
Their search is terrible, though, and it is terrible in ways that have nothing to do with content that is or is not blocked by uBlock Origin.
It's a very fuzzy and inclusive search, and that means that it is awful for finding specific things.
If I need a bag of insulated crimp terminals ring terminals that work on #10 screws and 12 AWG wire, then: That's what I need, what I search for, and what I want to browse.
And Amazon might show me some results that fit, but they'll be mixed in with results for extension cords, and machine screws, terminals for solar panels and car batteries, and also key rings: Stuff that has that has no merit to me today.
I just want some ring terminals, and they're more willing to show me everything else instead.
The noise is worse than actually-random results since my search terms are just sprinkled all over the place.
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> The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
Hey boss I made the site better! Through rigorous A/B testing I could figure out a way to tweak our search algorithm so people spend much more time on our site! It seems they now really enjoy browsing for products!
Ok but seriously, I have witnessed A/B testing go wrong in the past so I'm biased to blame everything on it. I wouldn't think this particular thing happened though. :)
What I could imagine is that they measure number of items bought or money spent, but even then if eg you don't also track how much of these people return stuff later you still might draw the wrong conclusions. Figuring out that a user is less likely to use your site six months down the line due to building frustration is even harder.
Amazon definitely tracks returns in their A/B tests, along with impact on long-term projections of customer value. What they also track is ad and sponsored products revenue. The sad truth with most Internet products is that advertisers are really good customers. They will pay you a lot of money with huge margins, and it's really hard for a business to say no to that.
My best guess is the algorithm has been tweaked to return exact results maybe 1/10 or 1/20 times, like a slot machine with the psychological manipulation and “reward centre activation” that comes with it.
> rigorous A/B testing
Also known as unethical, non-consensual human experimentation for profit maximization purposes.
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Amazon's founding principle of "customer obsession" has been turned inside out -- at least when it comes to thinking of us consumers as the cherished customers. Those days are over.
The new "customers" at the center of Amazon's business model are a global assortment of insta-merchants that don't make the products, don't handle their own logistics and don't have recognizable brands. So -- whoosh! -- in comes Amazon as the ultimate partner/toll-collector. For a fee (or actually for many fees) it will shine up these impostors to the point that they can conduct a lot of business on the Amazon platform.
When Amazon provides distorted search results, my hunch is that it's providing boosted listings for whatever pseudo-merchants are willing to pay up. Or that have agreed to buy other Amazon services. And, hey, Amazon is going the extra mile to make them feel well-treated
And it’s bonkers how little they care about things that impact the customer. I’m a “Vine” reviewer (free* products in exchange for a review). Sellers game this system by listing a dozen or two duplicate SKUs and submit them to Vine, each in very small quantities (<5). Then, they wait for the reviews to come in. Then any of the SKUs which got negative reviews are deactivated, and the rest of the listings are merged into one. Instant highly-reviewed product! A complete mockery of what both reviews and Vine are supposed to be about, yet Amazon turns a completely blind eye. I mean, one non-skilled FTE could do the job of policing Vine for abuse like that, and they do not even care a bit to try.
*Note, they 1099 you for full retail value so really it’s just a discount of 100% minus your marginal fed and state income tax rate!
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This is definitely the worst thing about Amazon. I pay them $120/year or whatever, and I search a specific product by a specific brand, and the entire browser screen shows me brands and even products I didn't even search for. I should not get ads in a store that I pay to use, especially in search.
If they keep you showing you ads, and you keep paying them $120, then I can't see why they'd stop showing you ads.
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Stop paying them. If you pay, you'll actually become a better product rather than cease being the product.
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I definitely agree that they don't return brand results. I don't use Amazon enough to remember the example(s) that were the final straw for me. Do you have any examples/remember which brand search you did? I am curious if some categories are "better" than others.
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I believe this occurs because Amazon allows sellers to promote their items by bidding on keywords— and often times, the highest quality keywords will be specific category-defining brands or products. At the same time, the original supplier of that brand or product keyword won’t need to spend their advertising budget on that query because customer conversion is high enough despite the friction.
Similarly, I think sponsored search results are unconscionable. Amazon is already taking a cut of every sale (which is obviously fine), but then they're also letting knock-off companies pay to show their product above the genuine article.
I'm going to assume you're in the USA, which may be incorrect.
I live in the third world, in Amazon's estimation-- Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands. If I search for something, there's a better-than-not chance that it will explicitly say in the search results under the item "ships to [Switzerland]," but when I click the item, I get "sorry, this item does not ship to your location" and I can't order it. It makes searching on Amazon incredibly frustrating because I have to click through every garbage 3rd-party knockoff of the thing I'm looking for to find the one garbage 3rd-party knockoff that ships to my uninhabited, remote shithole of the European backwaters (Zurich, Amsterdam, Cork). But will Amazon offer me an option to filter out things I can't have? No, of course not. Why? Shut up and stop asking questions, that's why.
What's worse, even this is still miles better than stuff-availability in Ireland was 20 years ago when I first moved over from Chicagoland. That was a blow to my expectations, I tell you hwat. I may have single-handedly kept eBay.com in the black between 2005-2016...
> I may have single-handedly kept eBay.com in the black between 2005-2016
Naw, that's one of eBay's strong points. Lots of ex-US business from int'l people willing to sell to others internationally. Or just breaking tariffs/barriers/price discrimination/parallel imports.
I just never understood most American seller's resistance to selling internationally, but worked out in my favour as a seller. I just charged a bit more than cost for shipping and it made up for any losses + inventory moved faster.
I've had similar experiences with the Google Play Store. For example, if I search for "Instagram" verbatim, my first result is TikTok.
I could not reproduce this result on desktop or Android. Any additional details to the steps you took?
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I also hate how the seller's pages are basically useless as well. I want to buy something from a specific brand and going to that page I can't find more than half of their product list on their own seller page.
While it's obvious that this is somehow commercially/financially advantageous to Amazon, I'd love to know more about why. What are the economics behind the shovelware merchandise Amazon upranks to users?
It's very simple. Amazon makes a lot of money on advertising and pay-for-placement within their store listings. So when you run a search, Amazon can easily make more money by showing items that they're paid the most to show, vs what you were actually looking for.
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Because just like Walmart, they're trying to get a price as low as possible to kill off competition. Amazon isn't "flooded" by these brands, they are purposefully seeking these sellers out and helping them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
> A seller in America might start with a brand idea and need to figure out how to get it manufactured; a seller connected to a factory in China’s manufacturing capital needs to figure out how to sell to Americans, which Amazon has been working hard to facilitate.
> “If a Chinese factory is able to give a better price than a seller in America, Amazon is happy with that,” said Kian Golzari, who works with marketplace sellers and corporate clients to source products from China.
If amazon sells a push broom for $10, why would would someone buy a push-broom from the local hardware store for $20?
Local hardware store struggles, eventually goes out of business...now everyone has no choice except to buy online, and guess who dominates that?
And now you're reliant on Amazon for everything.
Same thing Walmart did to endless communities across America. Dump stuff cheap in an area to starve all the local businesses to death, and then everyone had no choice but to buy everything from, and work at, walmart. And if anyone gets uppity about unions, close the store and now everyone within an hour has to drive even further to get anything...so everyone is terrified of any sort of workplace organization.
I think I'd probably cope with it including irrelevant and mislabelled stuff and the inevitable tons of Alibaba crap if it (.co.uk) didn't fail so hard at pagination that most of the results were inaccessible. Feels like some marketing bod has wargamed the "bust if we fix this people buy cheaper variants of the same product and don't check the Prime box" scenario and decided that as they're Amazon and people will use them regardless, broken search results are better than functional search results
Even in Apples "curated", "premium" official app store I never get the thing I search for first.
I always get an ad for something else (that isn't marked as an ad).
> The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
Truer words have never been spoken.
In 2022, Amazon had 38 billion dollars in ad revenue. That's ads in that search page. Between the ad revenue, and variations in what sale is more profitable for Amazon, you get a lot of incentive misalignment. The page that makes Amazon the most money is not the one where the item you were thinking about is the first thing on the page. Giving you a worse page is just far more profitable.
Heh - until you buy it... then it shows you a 'suggested' purchase to buy it again on every page :-P
>The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
They may be suggesting on sellers request unsold or rarely sold products that vaguely relate to searches, but sellers want to get rid of quickly.
My terrible suspicion is that these algos are good for the majority of people in the sense that they are prone to manipulation and buy these inferior borderline fraud products all the time, so the algo finds its target function results and optimize for these.
This is what we don’t seem to accept. Enshittification.
Also shipping and return policy is so convenient, that even the grumbling people are eating this up.
I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything store. I don't need to see 40 of the same exact item rebranded into various English horrors.
Walmart seems most primed to do this, barring third party sales. Or Sears, if they ever had a miraculous turnaround to their old days.
Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores. My biggest disappointment with them is that they never have what I want.
I think I'm OK with Amazon being Aliexpress for the US market. Sometimes I want to get random crap from the depths of Shenzhen, and Amazon is that. What is unfortunate is that they can't get "real" brands to sell there, because of their counterfeiting issue. The "mistake" Amazon made (that has probably made them hundreds of billions of dollars) was to let someone send in a box of crap and get paid when someone shopping for "Tide Laundry Detergent" gets their box of crap instead of Tide Laundry Detergent.
Other than that, they're where they are today because they're good. I just wouldn't buy anything valuable from them; laptops, cameras, phones, etc. Those you'll have to find a dedicated electronics retailer. But sometimes I'm like building a 3D printer and I want a touchscreen display or something for it... for $20 I can have one the same day. That is super neat. It works because no "brand" makes parts for hobbyists, and some company you've never heard of in China is actually the market leader. Amazon connects you to them... but also to billions of scammers. Caveat emptor.
Edit to add: I'm talking about the in-person stores. I have no idea what Wal-Mart and Target do online.
> Wal-Mart and Target are the 'curated' everything stores.
Are you talking in-store or online? If I go to walmart.com or target.com and search for "usb cable", I don't see a dozen cables that fit 95% of use cases like in the store. Walmart shows thousands of results, the vast majority of which are marketplace sellers selling through walmart.com. Target has "only" 753 results, 600+ of which I find are not actually sold directly by Target if I dive into the filters. Basically it feels like Walmart and Target are trying to turn their online shopping experience into amazon.com.
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The Walmart website is also a "marketplace". As it stands, the company's website is unreliable for finding goods and their prices and it is full of junk, which requires additional user-based filtering to find items of value. To me that is not "curated".
yeah buts its not even cheap like aliexpress. its overpriced mushroom brands!! there are no deals that I see on Amazon anymore, or at least maybe they know im more likely to pony up the extra $$, so thats what they show me…
I'm prone to losing sunglasses, so some years ago I went through the process of testing out a dozen Alibaba sunglasses to find the best ones. I settled on one that's $4/pair, sturdy, and looks/feels/functions just like a $50 pair. Of course, being Alibaba, I had to buy it in bulk, so I now have sunglasses for life.
But that brings me to the type of site I want to see. Not curated luxury products like Le Creuset cookware at a markup, but curated dirt-cheap Alibaba products with low margins that have been tested and vetted extensively.
Massdrop or Monoprice are a little bit like this, but only for a few niches like headphones or cables.
Massdrop (Drop?) has had filler garbage for quite a while. I think (maybe one) part of the issue is mechanical keyboards got much more popular and drops were less necessary for good stuff.
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Amazon is just SO EASY though. It's a vortex I can't escape. I tried ordering a Nintendo Switch from Walmart for my son's birthday. 3 days they told me. It didn't even ship. The website said I could "try" to cancel the order. "Try" I did, and that try failed. I then waited a few weeks and had to call them up and they said oh we will just mark it as lost in transit. Oh yeah, that sounds perfect. They wasted my time, they endangered my mission, they cost me money, and then THEY MADE ME TALK TO SOMEONE (who was very pleasant and it was pretty quickly resolved but that's a little cherry on a sundae made of poo,). Screw all that nonsense.
The only way for others to compete is to have a 3rd party help them all become just as easy as Amazon. We need someone to partner with Fedex and step up. Who can do it?
I’m shocked that people are having good experiences with Amazon delivery in 2023. For me, 2-day delivery means it’ll get here in a week or 2. And forget about customer service that can actually solve my issue.
I want whatever program you’re on
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I have several times ordered what appeared to be genuine, but turned out to be counterfeit products from Amazon which made it very easy to stop using the platform all together. Not only due to a concern about the build quality, but also safety. Who wants to give their kids, or cook with, counterfeit products which may contain toxic or carcinogenic materials?
Rebranded .. I'm getting really annoyed with the same product, different prices, different brand names apparently generated by some China-based anagram generator
But.. that's how a lot of products have always worked.
I think the difference is that before a lot of white-label product factories would cut territory-based deals with resellers, so in (for example) the US, that widget is called "Acme Widget" but in France that exact same widget is called "Le Widget Magnifique".
Around the world there might be 100+ companies selling that same product but typically not competing with each other because they would each have exclusive markets.
But now with these global marketplaces, that same approach feels weird exactly because you can suddenly see the same exact products being sold under different names, and it's a lot easier for any random business to white-label a product and reach a global audience.
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"I'd really like a more 'curated' or vetted everything store."
It exists for tools and parts and hardware: mcmaster.com
I wish Sears sold do-it-yourself-houses again like they did in the 1920s. That would be very cool of them.
If you go to a real lumber yard - the type of places the pros go - they will look at any blueprint print and prepare you the kit. Prices are better than Home Depot after you account for free delivery and they pick up your returns.
The kit won't include plumbing, HVAC, electric... so it isn't 100% what Sears did in the 1910s, but it is actually pretty close.
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Sears doesn't, but others do.
There used to be that. It was called Canopy. The best curated Amazon products. It was awesome.
Guess what? Amazon acquired them and vaporized it.
This seems like a solid business idea. Start up a company that deshittifies some BigCorp experience, become an existential threat to BigCorp, get acquired by BigCorp. Rinse and repeat.
Who loses?
Sometimes curation just means higher prices. My local Best Buy curates electronics, but none of them are cheaper than the hundreds of additional brands you can find on Amazon.
You can’t get a $50 WiFi 6 access point at Best Buy, but you can find that on Amazon.
I think what you are describing is Walmart or Target but with filters applied to turn off third party sellers.
As an aside, what’s interesting about Amazon is that once you unsubscribe from Prime, it’s not incredibly competitive with AliExpress for the right types of products. Usually if you can wait a week, you can wait two and save more money.
It's not about the price, it's about getting a more trustworthy device.
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There are more listings like that one, some are sold by Amazon. https://amzn.to/41Zf3hS
This is an affiliate link
If you're curated, you're not everything. If you want everything, well, expect everything.
You make a good and constructive point. A real everything store _should_ have both a "100w USB-C Power Adapter", and a "Long Life 100W USB C Premium Apple Android Galaxy Power Adapter US International iPad iPhone good luck LIFESTYLE".
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Feels like arguing semantics instead of replying to the stated wish
I can't get a hitman on amazon, so technically it's not an "everything store" to begin with. But for the purposes of this conversation it clearly is
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"everything" but only the "high quality" (or highER quality) instances of everything. seems pretty reasonable.
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Talk to friends and family, and only buy when someone has had a positive experience with a product before. Use outlets like consumer reports that do long-term reviews, etc.
I'll leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
Sears still exists?
It’s almost a stretch of the definition of “exist” but yeah. They mostly sell crap you’d find at a TJ Maxx or something, because they have neither name brands, nor most of their famous private labels that were good.
Yes, there's 13 stores left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears
> Walmart seems most primed to do this
The one time I used their ecommerce platform (due to a gift card), I got a damaged product drop-shipped as an Amazon gift.
Quality and trust are not words that I have ever associated with Walmart, even in the brick-and-mortar world where it is much harder to pull a fast one. Color me skeptical.
See I’m always kinda amused when I encounter Amazon arbitrage plays. I’m like “welp. I guess this one is on me for not knowing my item was cheap enough on Amazon to have room for the middleman to pay retail and still make money!”
As someone who uses Amazon regularly, we live in different worlds. My experience is pleasant and straightforward; I get what I want and it arrives quickly.
Yeah we must. Nothing I but from Amazon is what I expect and top that off with it arrives late despite me paying for prime. I ordered a blender last week that doesn’t even blend, which I only realized after I had loaded it up with stuff to make a smoothie.
When things show up and actually are what I expect based off of the image and they work right it is a rare surprise.
Counting it up, I've ordered 58 times from Amazon in 2023 and every single item was exactly what I asked for, and arrived within a few days. I wonder why we're having such wildly different experiences...
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They were late delivering an NVidia GPU I ordered before Xmas and when I complained to the agent he was like "You know what, keep the GPU when it arrives. And I'm refunding the purchase price. And I'm sending you a $5 gift card now too."
So, Amazon bought my good will back again with that. They shouldn't have had to do it, though.
Same. Amazon used to be great. But just about everything I receive now is clearly a hastily reboxed return (including shoes and earbuds) or garbage.
I’ve been more and more ordering elsewhere. I order direct from the manufacturer when I can.
I haven't ordered anything from Amazon in years so I don't know how they are today. I imagine they are worse now. The last thing I ordered was a repair part for a washing machine. What I got was an obviously used, returned/repackaged, broken part. That's when I gave up.
If this were happening for everyone, Amazon would have a stock market reckoning.
You might be buying off-brand stuff.
But what you'd find at Target or Microcenter, and you'll have a good time.
Amazon has a problem with counterfeit products and cooking with them in the very least should be a health concern and at the worst a hazard
If you have a specific product that you are looking for and it is eligible for Prime then I have found this to be the experience.
Where I have not found that is if I am browsing, e.g. today I wanted to look for an evaporative humidifier. The top results are sponsored and for brands I have never heard of like YougetTech. I find I have to depart Amazon, Google / Reddit for things to get a sense of what the trusted brands are and then go back on Amazon to purchase it.
Isn't that true for all stores, though? If I'm buying something like that, I'll always search for reviews before deciding, whether or not Amazon is involved. Even if it's at a brick-and-mortar store.
The phrase "caveat emptor" was coined long before Amazon existed.
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I'm genuinely baffled at your experience . I can't think of a single Amazon search I've done recently, not one, which didn't result in a page 1 filled entirely with drop-shipped Chinese junk with keysmash brand names like RETVUKOR. It has become almost entirely useless.
I have experienced almost the full cycle of enshittification. I remember when it arrived in my country (Spain). It was great. The catalog was very good. Customer service was very responsive. If I had a problem, they would return the money, no questions asked.
We were foolish to think that situation would last.
Nowadays the search is unusable. Unless you go to an individual brand's "amazon shop", you will only get products from UUMEBE, SYLTOM and YGWEEN. And "Amazon's pick" will be either Amazon's own product or TROWLY. Perhaps on the fourth page you will get a proper brand. You get products at $1 with a shipping cost of $67. Customer service now asks many questions. When you want to return something, the site uses dark patterns to try to nudge you into getting the products to the post office yourself instead of sending you a messenger. And the prime subscription price went up.
I cancelled my prime account. If I want Chinese quality merchandise there's a Chinese store very nearby where I can go and look at the plastic at least.
> If I want Chinese quality merchandise there's a Chinese store very nearby where I can go and look at the plastic at least.
You mean like the equivalent of sorting by lowest on eBay??
Like a Chinese guy I can walk up to and say, "I need a 120 foot HDMI and I will not be paying a cent over $22.43 for it because that's what's all the lowest cost sellers on eBay charge."
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My experience has been similar to yours in that things at least "felt" nice and convenient. That is, until the brand new first aid kit I ordered came with the safety seal broken and hastily taped over. Who knows what was done to the product? What if it was resealed with better effort? How could I possibly trust anything from Amazon?
Maybe ignorance is bliss.
Search Amazon for "Whetstone". You'll find tons of quality products from legitimate brands, mixed indiscriminately with the exact same dropshipped trash item repeated over and over for countless pages. Amazon has been entirely enshittified.
What are your standards for quality?
I’m an enthusiastic amateur home chef. I have ordered some of these “trash” whetstones.
My knives get sharp. They aren’t damaged. The whetstone works over time.
If you are like a knife artisan, yeah I guess Amazon won’t work for you. But I’m guessing the results work for 99.9% of people.
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I dunno how to square “tons of quality products from legitimate brands” with “entirely enshittified”…
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Your comment reads just like the reviews. Worthless
Amazon is great for buying products I already know I want. Prices are reasonable, shipping couldn’t be much faster (in my area), with Prime anyway. And it’s usually fairly easy to go directly to a known product (by name or model). Also their return policy can’t be beat by an online retailer (drop it off at Whole Foods/UPS, no box/shipping label needed).
Amazon is horrific for browsing or searching — anytime I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I want to have more data to inform a buying decision. Their reviews can’t be trusted, and their search results optimize Amazon and the sellers over the buyers.
I used to rely on Amazon for confidence in purchasing a good product, but that’s not been the case for 5-10 years. I have to do my research somewhere else (often Reddit) before making a purchase.
Unfortunately there are a number of products (e.g. iPhone cases) that even that’s impossible to do nowadays. But fortunately, these are usually cheaper products, so the risk is a bit lower.
I’ll still continue shopping at Amazon, once I know what I’m looking for, due to the things I mention in the first paragraph. But I no longer trust it for discovering products and informing choices there, particularly for anything meaningful.
They're fine at selling stuff, they're absolutely horrendous at being a place to search for a product if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. The solution is just to look for third-party specialist review sites who know what they're talking about.
They're risky if you do know what you're looking for, because of all the counterfeits and return scams and such. They're basically only OK if you're buying trash-tier goods on purpose, because there's no reason to counterfeit or scam with those and you already know they're going to be bad.
Amazons search is so bad that I typically use google/ddg to search their site for products
Same. Amazon search doesn’t do faceting when and where you expect.
When I want to search I use google or Reddit (mainly google across Reddit).
When I want to purchase I use Honey.
When I want to browse (home goods) I use shopDeft.com and switch to photo only mode.
Amazon search is so bad and has so many ads that there are multiple opportunities to do something new.
That makes it hard to filter though, doesn't it? I usually only bother looking at products with a 4 star and up rating.
If you stick to things that you
(a) don't care about the quality of, because they are either frivolously cheap or you are able to to the necessary 'QA' repairs and inspection yourself (for me these are things like circuit boards and household consumables);
(b) something you already know you want that specific thing of and the shipping speed and return policy make them the best online option;
(c) are only buying because you found it somewhere else and you didn't know you wanted it until you were told about it (deal sites like slickdeals are where I encounter this);
then amazon is fine.
> third-party specialist review sites
Are there any that you can recommend? Google seems very unreliable in that department these days, it's very hard to say which reviews are honest and which ones are basically ads. There's also the additional complication that some sites that try to be honest receive products from manufacturers, which limits what they can say to keep their manufacturer relationships going.
It's nearly impossible to find, because even the "supposed good" third party sites are just amazon referral link farms these days.
More and more I've taken to just checking what Costco sells, and if Target or Walmart (or other "big, real stores") are willing to ship and sell it themselves.
Kagi is pretty good at surfacing high quality third-party reviews. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
wirecutter
Also, google "best [item] reddit"
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Just fire up a news reader. Pretty much half of the content pushed is some sort of affiliate links assembled into an article/review
And also to hope hard that whatever you buy from Amazon is genuine and not a counterfeit copy. Amazon uses the same bin for both.
At least with Amazon, I don’t trust that I’m not getting fakes even if I know what I’m looking for.
It's barely even usable for buying Kindle books anymore.
Half the time I get tricked into buying a book my Kindle doesn't support and I have to spend half an hour yelling at support to get my money back.
Because they let you do the "buy and deliver to my kindle" thing even when your kindle is not supported. Then only when you grab your kindle to sync you learn the bad news.
This is very surprising to me. I've got a kindle from 2013 and never had any issue with unsupported books.
Is yours super older or what?
There are some books that just straight up are not supported on kindles or only on Kindle fire editions. Looking it actually recently changed, but "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces," you could buy in kindle format, but it would only work for the Kindle fire editions. Maybe it has gotten better, but I used to run into this a lot with textbooks. Would work on Kindle fires, but not paperwhite.
It's a Kindle Paperwhite. I think colour is usually the problem. Doesn't make sense to me either.
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Speaking of tricks.. a while back I turned off my “reading insights” in the Kindle app. Recently I’ve been re-reading Asimov and kindle reading insights popped up to congratulate me on my reading streak. Wouldn’t you know it — they’ve been tracking my reading this whole time, and I looked into it and there is no opt out short of closing my account (and subsequently losing access to my kindle library). Just absurd levels of stalking in the pursuit of data.
I don't condone this practice, but considering how "lucrative" data is, I read any sort of opt-out like this as "we're still going to collect the data but we'll hide the insights from you to make it look like we aren't." So, same with personalized ads on Google. Not sure how they're planning on implementing Maps location data such that Google "doesn't have" it, but color me skeptical for the time being.
That sounds like a clear GDPR violation, but I guess you are not in the EU?
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Not only does this almost never happen to me, but Amazon has added a Refund button that works automatically. If you select “Remove from Library” within a time window, it asks if you want a refund now. I have run into some bad scans, but never had a problem getting an instant refund. What’s fascinating is how different experiences are.
Do you know if that's a recent addition? That definitely wasn't the case the last time it happened to me. I'm very fuzzy about when that was exactly. Probably in the last year or so. I had to go through support, who initially told me there were no refunds, but relented after some cajoling.
Could also be a matter of differing practices in different countries, or prime membership(I have none).
I definitely agree it's weird how different people's experiences are though.
Really? That's super surprising, I probably buy a dozen or so books every year now (and used to order far more when I was living abroad and there wasn't a decent english bookstore in my city) and have never had an issue. Now trying to use goodreads... that's a mess
It feels like it's reverting to how it was in the early 2010's -- dozens of identical super low quality knockoffs, normal brand name products that are overpriced or just absent from their store, reviews that can't be trusted, and dealing with third-party sellers of varying legitimacy. Around the time they started prime, there started having a lot more product variety and the prices of the knockoffs were pretty good for the quality. But over the last few years, prices have gone up a lot and a lot of the negative qualities of the past have returned.
In my experience, Amazon has devolved into AliExpress/DHGate but with higher prices and faster shipping. The throwaway products also make more of an effort to Americanize the syllables of their brand name
You’re in a bubble if you believe this. On a personal level sure, but my middle aged and old family members use it for everything and they are the last ones to understand internet things. They have 0 complaints, though I personally have my own issues with listing quality and review growth hacking.
While I don't think it's the best shopping experience on the web, I've also never understood those who have claimed it's awful in recent years. I'd be interested in what it is specifically that you don't like? And what changes you would like them to make to make it better?
I think part of the problem they've been having is that because they're an "everything store" they don't have a clear target audience so disappoint everyone. There are online stores I love out there, but they tend to be opinionated about the type of products they stock and how they do things, so although I have less of a selection it's more likely to be stuff I want. But that opinionated nature means a lot of people just won't shop with them because it's not what they want.
A lot of the issues I seem to hear here stem from relatively high end consumers seeing cheap products on Amazon and not liking that it's difficult to find the quality. But similarly elsewhere I read accounts from people looking for cheap products and saying that there are cheaper places to shop these days. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon was just a little more opinionated about what they stock whether that would help a bit. It would at least reduce disappointment. Although I suppose that goes against their whole ethos of having everything.
> vacuum in the market for an "everything store" that's actually good.
I would like a "what store is everything in" product. Search for something, and it gives you back matching products in stores 5/10/50 miles from you; purchase online, pickup from the store (or pay for an ubereats like delivery). As you build a cart, it attempts to cluster items. You get the convenience of search and online purchase, so that you don't waste time wandering around stores and not finding things, and you get the item in your hand quicker if you're prepared to go get it once purchased.
Big advantage to whoever built it: you don't need to compete with Amazon on logistics. On the other hand, you have a hell of a network effect to overcome, though if you focused on one geography only to start, it could be doable.
Such a thing, if it took off, could reinvigorate physical retail businesses. Google had a half-assed attempt for a while with local shopping, but they never really pushed it that hard...which I think was a missed opportunity.
I think google still does this, but yes it’s probably very half-assed.
I think the real product there would be a universal inventory system for all stores. And small stores like local hardware stores might not have comprehensive inventory, so then you get in to things like inventory scanning robots.
Point being there’s several layers of missing pieces (I believe, I know next to nothing about retail) that make the top layer hard or impossible. Google for example is probably plugging in to APIs for a few large stores like target and Walmart and skipping all the little ones.
I guess another option is a store network that is a franchise model of one company. All the products come from that company but franchise owners decide what they actually stock and carry. So they could be a hardware store or a home goods store etc but it’s all one centralized system underneath. Each store has a standard fulfillment system so you can pick up in store or get things shipped.
Alternatively it would be nice to see an Amazon style store but everything is vetted as decent quality. Problem is it’s just hard to keep up with the flow of new goods from overseas showing up on Amazon and if you’re going to vet items for quality that’s going to add overhead. I guess that’s basically what stores like Target do.
I recommend using a sophisticated ad blocker like uBlock origin or AdGuard for Safari to disable most of the irrelevant stuff and upsells that Amazon pushes to keep you shopping for hours instead of finding what you were looking for.
I started a personal collection where I just kept removing sponsored content or really anything that wasn’t relevant to what I was searching for or what was in my cart. I spend way less time on Amazon now. It’s not really meant for general use, and I don’t update it much, but here’s what I have if anyone wants to try it for themselves:
https://github.com/namuol/browser-qol/blob/main/blocker-rule...
They have a lot of things (excluding books) but they are only interesting in switzerland: Galaxus.ch (their site is available in english, german, italian and french). They have the best speed and filters i have tried. And the ui is relatively compact compare to other online retailers i have access to. Reichlt in Germany has good filters but they are very slow where i am accessing them from.
Unfortunately every retailer are also starting to be a platform for other shops as well, inflating their numbers and polluting their search results.
Amazon really has terrible filters and search.
I went shopping on there for Legos for Christmas.
SEVERAL of the products on the first page werer knock off Legos in boxes that looked almost identical to actual Lego boxes, fonts, numbering, and all.
It’s just a scam site now that happens to also sell legitimate products.
Searching for other products results in more irrelevant products every day. Even searching for exact product names will not get you that product that you know is on there. The search seems to have been gamed into a mess.
I've found that, at least on the mobile app, results are filtered by "Featured" which fills the results with irrelevant sponsored products. So each time I search for an item, I then have to go under Filters and select Best Rating, Highest Selling, etc. It's a bit tedious but seems to be a shortcut through all of the BS results they show you by default.
De-duping products across made-up brands is the most sorely needed feature in the era of no effort drop shipping. This should be supremely feasible with the latest generation of ai image recognition/labeling capabilities. More many product categories this would decimate the number of options that need to be considered.
> They're hard to compete with because they're giant and have an amazing logistics network
... and because they have terms that are actively anti-competitive, like if you sell there, you can't sell the same items anywhere else online for a lower price (even if the other venue has lower associated costs).
Yeah. I am quietly anti-Amazon so I mostly do not use the site. Occasionally, I'll browse for something I need and its really a shitshow:
- searching for a brand, rarely returns items by the brand
- search results are extremely poor and quickly get worse as you browse
- they hold packages for shipping by non-prime members
I haven't used Amazon regularly in several years so maybe it is more apparent for me. I also don't trust the "higher" end products to not be counterfit. It's a classic case of overoptimization, they may make more money but the experience is SO BAD. I have bought elsewhere because it was honestly kind of a chore to find what I wanted on the site.
In theory this is Costco. I have a membership to both Amazon and Costco, but for some reason keep using Amazon. I assume this is because 1) habits are hard to change and 2) Amazon is guaranteed to have what I’m looking for, even if ultimately it’s not very good.
Retail is so low-margin that it will never be very good.
Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, are all very imperfect businesses. Even Costco is rough to deal with for the suppliers - there’s just no way to do this at scale while being all nice and fuzzy
Amazon is especially bad though
All they have to do is get rid of the 3rd party storefront and hire people to stock and procure vetted goods instead of having it be a free-for-all.
Well, yeah but the margins on operating a platform for 3rd party sellers is way better than actually just selling stuff.
Think about it - Amazon gets to take a fee on - accepting inventory into warehouse, holding inventory, listing fees, listing ads, sales fee, shipping products, accepting returns, destroying returned merchandise.. and probably a few more things.
Amazon makes money whether the underlying sale of products is unprofitable .. because that's someone else's problem.
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There are plenty of stores that do this. The selection is much lower and prices are higher.
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Seriously. Even worse there are things I want, I know the name and the brand but I can't order from Amazon because of the high risk of counterfeits. I hope they either get their house in order or someone eats their lunch.
I don't use Amazon at all anymore. In fact I uninstalled the app yesterday!
I uninstalled it a few weeks ago because the Android app started injecting a "search this term on Amazon" button that popped when whenever I selected text in any app
What is wrong with these people? Are they devoid of any taste or decorum? Who makes those decisions?
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Oh, it has an app? Never occurred to me to look for one.
Can you be more specific about what is terrible about Amazon ? Cause you just said they have an amazing logistics network + everything for sale
You can search for something simple on Amazon - scroll past to the end of the results and not find it.
You can then open up your favorite Search Engine and see it as the first result, linking to Amazon.
> an "everything store" that's actually good
I'm pretty skeptical that such a thing is possible.
There is no competition. I'm not an economist but a monopoly is not a free market in my view.
third party sellers and "commingling" have all but ruined Amazon for me :/. even shipped and sold by Amazon can yield you fake products (worst performance, not as advertised, knock offs, unsafe, etc).
but I guess it generates too much money for Amazon to care :(
As far as I can tell they for me also seem to not do their due diligence when it comes to handling consumer deception and abuse of their marked platform.
Honestly I'm surprised that there have not been any larger scale legal consequences given that Amazone seems to be economically harmful to the domestic market (kills domestic competition but in different to the competition manages to avoid a lot more taxes) of most non-US countries and it's given them perfect munition to use PR and legal means under the guise of consumer protection against it.
Just to be clear protectionism is a dangerous tool, which only should be wielded in a generic non target specific way, like requiring online shopping platforms, even if they sometimes just act as a proxy, to fulfill a certain degree of due diligence when it comes to effectively handling fraudulent companies selling through them. That also probably could get ride of TEMU (which is more a tool of spying, economical warfar and other bad stuff then any honest competitive selling platform, they are losing too much money on each sale for that).
I mean a think which had been true before the internet was that if you can't provide a service reasonable safely you can't provide it at all (grossly oversimplified, not that people didn't try and got away with it). No reason this shouldn't apply to the internet. (Many TEMU products are not legal to be imported in the EU, often due to safety reasons, sometimes due to other reasons like being imitations of (Nazi germany time) Nazi artifices and stuff like that).
the problem is capitalism necessitates enshittification.
you aren't getting a contender as long as the regulations are abhorrently lax about both the workers and the sellers. along with consumer rights. there just is no economic incentive to improve but rather dig the moat.
(1) Expand network of friends/family. (2) Buy only when you get a recommendation from friends/family. (3) profit? :)
Asking the government to create regulations for product quality just means that the lobbyists who actually write those regulations are going to fuck you over yet again.
I would agree but [1] is likely one of the top 3 biggest exiatential issues facing mankind right now. We live in an age of increasingly weaker connections between people.
So while in paper these 3 items look easy, they're likely not.
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that's a nice quaint small town logic. we are talking about millions of lives across many industries.
government is the family no matter how you personally emotionally identify it.
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