7 ms·

Beyond Apple accessories, Amazon is getting more and more unusable. With electronics and fashion, it's due to wading through fakes. But in virtually any categ

by saryant 10y ago

Beyond Apple accessories, Amazon is getting more and more unusable. With electronics and fashion, it's due to wading through fakes. But in virtually any category, the problem is wading through tens of thousands of results. The reviews can't be trusted. I've seen so many products with a seemingly five-star rating, but the top three up-voted reviews are 1-star. Yesterday I was searching for bedsheets. The term "bed sheet set" returns over 600,000 results. I just want the top 5 or 10. I don't want to wade through this many. Problem is, if I can't trust the reviews, how do I sort the shit from what I actually want? With some products, of course, this isn't a problem—books, for instance—but that's only because I know what title I'm looking for or my search is so niche that I'm only going to get a tiny handful of results. There's big money in someone taking Costco's model of picking the handful of products in a category that will work for most people and applying it to Amazon. Either search needs to get a hell of a lot better or someone needs to bring in curation. (I used to be skeptical of business models like Casper but now I get it—a lack of options can be a luxury)

gshakir 10y ago
Yes, I agree that reviews cannot be trusted. When I was shopping for a probiotic, the 5 stars products were mostly filled with paid reviews where the reviewer gets the product at a discount for their "honest" review.
cmdrfred 10y ago
Also the way Amazon averages reviews is... interesting to say the least. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B01B6ZI2Y8/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_btm?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B01B6ZI2Y8/ref=cm_cr_dp...
- endemic 10y ago
  tl;dr version: http://imgur.com/a/eXWFE http://imgur.com/a/eXWFE
CydeWeys 10y ago
> With some products, of course, this isn't a problem—books, for instance Don't be so sure. I've run across counterfeit books on Amazon before. The quality of them was vastly inferior (covers printed on inkjets and laminated, basically), and of course no money is actually going to the author. I'd much sooner buy a real softcover book than a fake hardcover book.
malcolmputer 10y ago
I think for me the main issue is the lack of a decent search. Take for example buying a power supply from Newegg.com or Amazon.com: I want a 750W PSU, made by Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, or NZXT with at least 4 Molex, at least 1 GPU power (8pin) and a Platinum efficiency rating. With newegg I can set those filters, then sort by lowest price or highest reviews or re-evaluate the filters. With Amazon I can search for 750W Power supply, and then maybe have some of the choices on the left, but not every vendor lists their product correctly.
- anbotero 10y ago
  They did something I have yet to understand (unless their plan was to allow non-verified reviews to flood products): they changed the “smart” average filter they had before to something that sucks. Before, if you chose to sort by “Average Customer Reviews”, it would intelligently throw first results as the ones with most reviews, and of those the most positive. Now it just sorts by “quality” of those reviews, so you item may have two five-star reviews and appear first than a thousands four-star review average item. It sucks. Also, I don’t see the option to filter further by verified buyer reviews from the search: I have to go to the item itself and do it on the customer reviews section. All in all, yeah, Amazon is starting to suck bad on quality of products, or rather, quality of searching of products.
- jrockway 10y ago
  This makes me a bad person, but I just go to Newegg to search and then buy from Amazon. Newegg leaves a bad taste in my mouth. "Pay $3 extra to have your order processed _today_!" Do they still do that? That said, B&H is quickly becoming my favorite photo/electronics store. But you have to buy from somewhere else when they go on a 2 week vacation (or sundown Friday to sundown Saturday ;)
  - mortenjorck 10y ago
    B&H is the best. Their search and overall UI is great, their browsing taxonomy is incredible (especially when you're looking for something in their wheelhouse; if you're shopping for, say, a very specific type of camera lens, it's effortless to narrow to exactly the choices you want), and on top of all that, they're usually price-competitive with Amazon. Their closing on orthodox Jewish holidays takes a bit of getting used to, but I just consider it part of the brand now.
joosters 10y ago
Amazon's search system is terribly broken, in many way. For example, if you try to sort by price, perhaps to find the cheapest option, then the results will be filled with random other items from completely unrelated products, no matter how exact your search is, or whether or not you are searching in one department/section or another.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  God, yes. Searching by price gives you a price-first ordering of every possible result for any part of your search term.
- thearn4 10y ago
  I think it's a problem with 3rd party sellers being chronically incapable of listing their products correctly. Overall the platform would benefit from at least a small amount of manual curating.
- sesutton 10y ago
  Sorting by best score is equally useless. You get random products that have one 5 star review that are often nothing like what you actually searched for. A better method would be the one described here[0], which reddit uses for its "best" comment sorting. [0]http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
wpietri 10y ago
> a lack of options can be a luxury Definitely. I worked for a couple of years on a startup that aimed to help people make better shopping decisions. In user interviews and tests, we really saw the pain. The technical term for this is "tyranny of choice". [1] One important distinction here is that shopping behavior tends to fall into one of two modes, optimizer and satisficer. [2] Satisficers just want to pick something adequate; optimizers want to pick the best thing. Everybody does both, but people tend toward one side or another. People here surely skew toward optimizer, so the problem is especially painful for us. Amazon's reviews have become so reliable that my first stop will often be something like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, or SweetHome. Knowing that some other optimizer has already done the research lets makes me more comfortable making a satisficer-style choice. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/17723028 http://www.economist.com/node/17723028 [2] http://abundancemeasures.blogspot.com/2012/01/choice-part-ii-satisficers-vs.html http://abundancemeasures.blogspot.com/2012/01/choice-part-ii...
- endemic 10y ago
  I'll confirm your anecdote RE: using other websites for curated reviews. I recently needed a new router; instead of wading through the innumerable search results on Amazon, I simply chose Wirecutter's recommendation.
  - spencerflem 10y ago
    100% agree. The Wirecutter rocks.
  - pimlottc 10y ago
    I've been doing that too. My experiences have generally been good, but I do feel a bit of unease at basically giving them somewhat blind trust.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    I usually look through a few brands that haven't irked me yet on OpenWRT's HCL since I'll stick that on anything I'm likely to buy anyway.
  - 10y ago
techthroway443 10y ago
> Problem is, if I can't trust the reviews, how do I sort the shit from what I actually want? Purchase only "Best Seller" items?
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  This whole article is about how the "best seller" chargers and cables are fakes that can burn your house down and destroy your electronics. I just checked and the 2nd best selling item in laptop chargers category is a fake Macbook charger.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
M_Grey 10y ago
It's too bad, it used to be incredibly useful, not it's just a way I pre-shop before I look at some place I can trust to make an actual purchase.
Symbiote 10y ago
> I just want the top 5 or 10. Why not go to a normal shop, or that shop's website? You probably know which shops sell budget, middle and high-end furnishings. They've made the effort to filter 50,000 products to the 10 or so which they sell. For example, Ikea have 138 bed sheet sets. An obvious filter, like "green", leads to about 10 different products. My local fancy department store has 160 sets, "green" filters that down to 18.
- saryant 10y ago
  Well, yeah. That's what I'm going to end up doing because Amazon is such a disaster at this point.
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  Well, to be fair, Ikea has 138 bed sheet /patterns/. They have three different underlying sets (not counting size combinations). Similar with furniture, for each item there's typically a low-end, medium-end, and high-end option/style (relatively speaking) and only color variations for each.
- closeparen 10y ago
  >Why not go to a normal shop Amazon Prime is a lifestyle. People are increasingly choosing to forego cars and live in trendy urban neighborhoods. Ground-level storefronts give these places energy and atmosphere and "walkability," but the practical retail (bodegas, drugstores) tends to be overpriced, and the rest of the retail tends not to be practical (my block is a "lite" version of this and includes boutique clothing, $10,000 furniture, and "tasting room" that could be mistaken for a bar except it closes at 9pm). People want Target, Kohl's, IKEA, and other suburban shopping mall products at their suburban shopping mall prices, but when you're car-free, those stores are hard to get to and really hard to get back from with cargo. So you do your shopping on your laptop and let the UPS man do the hauling for you. Amazon Prime's delivery speed softens the blow of delayed gratification, so you prefer it whenever possible. You might feel like a helpless child dependent on the real adults to bring things to you (or drive you around) - I know I did when I lived this way - but I have to admit the efficiency of a few rarely-parked usually-full delivery vehicles buzzing around beats acres of cars languishing in parking spaces until their owners' next shopping trip.
AJ007 10y ago
Sheets and Apple chargers are two great examples of Amazon at its worst. The chargers have been a problem for years, and have been posted about many times before. Just recently there was a big controversy about Wal-Mart selling "Egyptian cotton" sheets that were sourced from Egypt. Good luck buying "Egyptian cotton" sheets on Amazon that aren't poor quality microfiber.
jseliger 10y ago
(I used to be skeptical of business models like Casper but now I get it—a lack of options can be a luxury) There are also outfits like The Wirecutter and The Sweethome that attempt to wade through all the stuff and find what's actually good. I wouldn't call either perfect but they are pretty good and a good place to start. Places like Blue Apron are also now opening "marketplaces" that have specific stuff (https://www.blueapron.com/market https://www.blueapron.com/market) that seems somewhat better than randomly picking off Amazon or Google.
x2f10 10y ago
>There's big money in someone taking Costco's model of picking the handful of products in a category that will work for most people and applying it to Amazon. They're more or less attempting to do so with "Amazon's Choice", no? https://www.amazon.com/b?node=12691228011 https://www.amazon.com/b?node=12691228011

by saryant 10y ago

gshakir 10y ago

Yes, I agree that reviews cannot be trusted. When I was shopping for a probiotic, the 5 stars products were mostly filled with paid reviews where the reviewer gets the product at a discount for their "honest" review.

cmdrfred 10y ago

Also the way Amazon averages reviews is... interesting to say the least. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B01B6ZI2Y8/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_btm?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B01B6ZI2Y8/ref=cm_cr_dp...

endemic 10y ago
tl;dr version: http://imgur.com/a/eXWFE http://imgur.com/a/eXWFE

CydeWeys 10y ago

> With some products, of course, this isn't a problem—books, for instance Don't be so sure. I've run across counterfeit books on Amazon before. The quality of them was vastly inferior (covers printed on inkjets and laminated, basically), and of course no money is actually going to the author. I'd much sooner buy a real softcover book than a fake hardcover book.

malcolmputer 10y ago

I think for me the main issue is the lack of a decent search. Take for example buying a power supply from Newegg.com or Amazon.com: I want a 750W PSU, made by Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, or NZXT with at least 4 Molex, at least 1 GPU power (8pin) and a Platinum efficiency rating. With newegg I can set those filters, then sort by lowest price or highest reviews or re-evaluate the filters. With Amazon I can search for 750W Power supply, and then maybe have some of the choices on the left, but not every vendor lists their product correctly.

anbotero 10y ago
They did something I have yet to understand (unless their plan was to allow non-verified reviews to flood products): they changed the “smart” average filter they had before to something that sucks. Before, if you chose to sort by “Average Customer Reviews”, it would intelligently throw first results as the ones with most reviews, and of those the most positive. Now it just sorts by “quality” of those reviews, so you item may have two five-star reviews and appear first than a thousands four-star review average item. It sucks. Also, I don’t see the option to filter further by verified buyer reviews from the search: I have to go to the item itself and do it on the customer reviews section. All in all, yeah, Amazon is starting to suck bad on quality of products, or rather, quality of searching of products.
jrockway 10y ago
This makes me a bad person, but I just go to Newegg to search and then buy from Amazon. Newegg leaves a bad taste in my mouth. "Pay $3 extra to have your order processed _today_!" Do they still do that? That said, B&H is quickly becoming my favorite photo/electronics store. But you have to buy from somewhere else when they go on a 2 week vacation (or sundown Friday to sundown Saturday ;)
- mortenjorck 10y ago
  B&H is the best. Their search and overall UI is great, their browsing taxonomy is incredible (especially when you're looking for something in their wheelhouse; if you're shopping for, say, a very specific type of camera lens, it's effortless to narrow to exactly the choices you want), and on top of all that, they're usually price-competitive with Amazon. Their closing on orthodox Jewish holidays takes a bit of getting used to, but I just consider it part of the brand now.

joosters 10y ago

Amazon's search system is terribly broken, in many way. For example, if you try to sort by price, perhaps to find the cheapest option, then the results will be filled with random other items from completely unrelated products, no matter how exact your search is, or whether or not you are searching in one department/section or another.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago
God, yes. Searching by price gives you a price-first ordering of every possible result for any part of your search term.
thearn4 10y ago
I think it's a problem with 3rd party sellers being chronically incapable of listing their products correctly. Overall the platform would benefit from at least a small amount of manual curating.
sesutton 10y ago
Sorting by best score is equally useless. You get random products that have one 5 star review that are often nothing like what you actually searched for. A better method would be the one described here[0], which reddit uses for its "best" comment sorting. [0]http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

wpietri 10y ago

> a lack of options can be a luxury Definitely. I worked for a couple of years on a startup that aimed to help people make better shopping decisions. In user interviews and tests, we really saw the pain. The technical term for this is "tyranny of choice". [1] One important distinction here is that shopping behavior tends to fall into one of two modes, optimizer and satisficer. [2] Satisficers just want to pick something adequate; optimizers want to pick the best thing. Everybody does both, but people tend toward one side or another. People here surely skew toward optimizer, so the problem is especially painful for us. Amazon's reviews have become so reliable that my first stop will often be something like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, or SweetHome. Knowing that some other optimizer has already done the research lets makes me more comfortable making a satisficer-style choice. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/17723028 http://www.economist.com/node/17723028 [2] http://abundancemeasures.blogspot.com/2012/01/choice-part-ii-satisficers-vs.html http://abundancemeasures.blogspot.com/2012/01/choice-part-ii...

endemic 10y ago
I'll confirm your anecdote RE: using other websites for curated reviews. I recently needed a new router; instead of wading through the innumerable search results on Amazon, I simply chose Wirecutter's recommendation.
- spencerflem 10y ago
  100% agree. The Wirecutter rocks.
- pimlottc 10y ago
  I've been doing that too. My experiences have generally been good, but I do feel a bit of unease at basically giving them somewhat blind trust.
- mjevans 10y ago
  I usually look through a few brands that haven't irked me yet on OpenWRT's HCL since I'll stick that on anything I'm likely to buy anyway.
- 10y ago

techthroway443 10y ago

> Problem is, if I can't trust the reviews, how do I sort the shit from what I actually want? Purchase only "Best Seller" items?

nommm-nommm 10y ago
This whole article is about how the "best seller" chargers and cables are fakes that can burn your house down and destroy your electronics. I just checked and the 2nd best selling item in laptop chargers category is a fake Macbook charger.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

M_Grey 10y ago

It's too bad, it used to be incredibly useful, not it's just a way I pre-shop before I look at some place I can trust to make an actual purchase.

Symbiote 10y ago

> I just want the top 5 or 10. Why not go to a normal shop, or that shop's website? You probably know which shops sell budget, middle and high-end furnishings. They've made the effort to filter 50,000 products to the 10 or so which they sell. For example, Ikea have 138 bed sheet sets. An obvious filter, like "green", leads to about 10 different products. My local fancy department store has 160 sets, "green" filters that down to 18.

saryant 10y ago
Well, yeah. That's what I'm going to end up doing because Amazon is such a disaster at this point.
FireBeyond 10y ago
Well, to be fair, Ikea has 138 bed sheet /patterns/. They have three different underlying sets (not counting size combinations). Similar with furniture, for each item there's typically a low-end, medium-end, and high-end option/style (relatively speaking) and only color variations for each.
closeparen 10y ago
>Why not go to a normal shop Amazon Prime is a lifestyle. People are increasingly choosing to forego cars and live in trendy urban neighborhoods. Ground-level storefronts give these places energy and atmosphere and "walkability," but the practical retail (bodegas, drugstores) tends to be overpriced, and the rest of the retail tends not to be practical (my block is a "lite" version of this and includes boutique clothing, $10,000 furniture, and "tasting room" that could be mistaken for a bar except it closes at 9pm). People want Target, Kohl's, IKEA, and other suburban shopping mall products at their suburban shopping mall prices, but when you're car-free, those stores are hard to get to and really hard to get back from with cargo. So you do your shopping on your laptop and let the UPS man do the hauling for you. Amazon Prime's delivery speed softens the blow of delayed gratification, so you prefer it whenever possible. You might feel like a helpless child dependent on the real adults to bring things to you (or drive you around) - I know I did when I lived this way - but I have to admit the efficiency of a few rarely-parked usually-full delivery vehicles buzzing around beats acres of cars languishing in parking spaces until their owners' next shopping trip.

AJ007 10y ago

Sheets and Apple chargers are two great examples of Amazon at its worst. The chargers have been a problem for years, and have been posted about many times before. Just recently there was a big controversy about Wal-Mart selling "Egyptian cotton" sheets that were sourced from Egypt. Good luck buying "Egyptian cotton" sheets on Amazon that aren't poor quality microfiber.

jseliger 10y ago

(I used to be skeptical of business models like Casper but now I get it—a lack of options can be a luxury) There are also outfits like The Wirecutter and The Sweethome that attempt to wade through all the stuff and find what's actually good. I wouldn't call either perfect but they are pretty good and a good place to start. Places like Blue Apron are also now opening "marketplaces" that have specific stuff (https://www.blueapron.com/market https://www.blueapron.com/market) that seems somewhat better than randomly picking off Amazon or Google.

x2f10 10y ago

>There's big money in someone taking Costco's model of picking the handful of products in a category that will work for most people and applying it to Amazon. They're more or less attempting to do so with "Amazon's Choice", no? https://www.amazon.com/b?node=12691228011 https://www.amazon.com/b?node=12691228011