3 ms·

I bet this is related to another quirk, where "sort by price" doesn't really result in things being in the expected order. I suspect (because I have a similar

I bet this is related to another quirk, where "sort by price" doesn't really result in things being in the expected order. I suspect (because I have a similar challenge in our own ecommerce system) that the model underlying the representation of products has at least one additional layer of specificity, that's not directly revealed to the user. Consider that you're looking at Products, but what they're really manipulating are products as sourced from a particular supplier. Each of those "supplier-items" has its own price (because with Amazon marketplace, the supplier gets to set their own), as well as its own potential shipping destinations. When you project that into search results as a list of Products, what you wind up with is a list of "Products for which there's at least one supplier willing to ship to Iceland". And the sorting is something like "order by lowest price offered by all suppliers". When you click on that product to go to Product Details, and then just click "Add to Cart", they've lost the thread of "I need to select a supplier of this product that will ship to Iceland".

Sir_Substance 11y ago
>I suspect (because I have a similar challenge in our own ecommerce system) that the model underlying the representation of products has at least one additional layer of specificity, that's not directly revealed to the user. Consider that you're looking at Products, but what they're really manipulating are products as sourced from a particular supplier. There's no doubt that's the case, but it also isn't that big a problem to solve (at least for amazon, your mileage may vary, possibly my commiserations depending on how good/bad your system is to work on). I know this because of the "Does amazon ship to...?" plugin, which can iterate over every seller instance of a specific item and return it's eligibility for shipping to your country, along with an independent shipping price and item price. It can process two dozen instances in about a second or two via whatever API it uses. Considering this is possible and frankly not all that difficult, I'm placing the blame for amazon not using a bit of JS-foo to run this form of processing server side (where it will be way faster) and deliver results to my browser asynchronously as they are finished squarely at the feet of amazons marketing department. This has the stink of "if we show it to them anyway, maybe they'll buy it and send it via a shipping service" all over it.

Sir_Substance 11y ago

>I suspect (because I have a similar challenge in our own ecommerce system) that the model underlying the representation of products has at least one additional layer of specificity, that's not directly revealed to the user. Consider that you're looking at Products, but what they're really manipulating are products as sourced from a particular supplier. There's no doubt that's the case, but it also isn't that big a problem to solve (at least for amazon, your mileage may vary, possibly my commiserations depending on how good/bad your system is to work on). I know this because of the "Does amazon ship to...?" plugin, which can iterate over every seller instance of a specific item and return it's eligibility for shipping to your country, along with an independent shipping price and item price. It can process two dozen instances in about a second or two via whatever API it uses. Considering this is possible and frankly not all that difficult, I'm placing the blame for amazon not using a bit of JS-foo to run this form of processing server side (where it will be way faster) and deliver results to my browser asynchronously as they are finished squarely at the feet of amazons marketing department. This has the stink of "if we show it to them anyway, maybe they'll buy it and send it via a shipping service" all over it.