Comment by alex43578
19 hours ago
I guess for things like clothes or generic homegoods, I've seen this deluge of random China goods. But shopping for other things, like electronics, it does a really good job of surfacing what I'm actually looking for, whether that be name brand or generic.
If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.
Surprisingly, their "Alexa for Shopping" feature has been quite good for finding products that contain a specific set of desired features.
I was looking for a device that plugs into my car's 12V cigarette lighter outlet, connects with my phone's Bluetooth, outputs the audio to 3.5mm aux (my car has aux input but no Bluetooth), has no battery, automatically turns on with my car, has next and previous track buttons, and outputs USB-C with at least 30W.
Amazon's search filters were useless for this, but their LLM was able to read through reviews and suggest products that come very close. Unfortunately, no exact product exists that fulfills all the requirements.
Their LLM tells me that it can't perform searches and can't read reviews, and then does both things anyway. It consistently takes me at least 4 interactions before it begins to produce useful results.
It may be better than the uselessness of the Amazon search box, but that's a very low bar.
I went through that same search a couple times. I felt that this was such an obvious thing that I was amazed that it didn't exist on Amazon, Aliexpress, or anything else.