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This is neat. My biggest complaint with Amazon these days is there's just so much noise on the site. For any given search I expect like half the results not to
by dcosson 10y ago
This is neat. My biggest complaint with Amazon these days is there's just so much noise on the site. For any given search I expect like half the results not to be serious ones. Even when you filter for just prime, there are tons of edge cases like the mini version of a thing will be prime but the regular version is not, or only one color is prime, or sometimes the item is clearly more expensive than in a store so you're paying the full consumer cost of 2-day shipping even though it's prime, sometimes the item has changed slightly but still includes the old reviews which are now misleading, etc. In some ways these are nitpicks, but Amazon have set the bar so high that now I expect the magical experience that I get with Amazon-fulfilled items for everything on the site.
Anyway I feel like amazon would be even better if these low quality listings were moved off to a separate site which was explicitly 3rd-party (whether from businesses or individuals) similar to Ebay. And then the main site would have "official" stuff where amazon does more quality assurance on the listings and it's all fulfilled by them and Prime. (I also think that better curation like this is necessary for purchasing through Echo to really catch on at least for me, there are way too many gotchas in Amazon listings that I still feel like I need to actually focus and look carefully through the listing before I buy anything).
My idea is obviously very different than this Bangalore-only product but there's a glimmer of a separate 3rd-party only site here and I hope Amazon evolves in that direction.
- salmonet 10y agoAgreed. I also think such a spinoff would do well against ebay. I tried using paypal/ebay yesterday and gave up after 3 hours of trying to get a payment to go through. It was like going back in time to the 90s
- nocoder 10y agoAmazon actually tried doing this with junglee.com. The challenge of course is generating traffic for a separate entity, plus it is more costly. So now it has sort of integrated Junglee with Amazon where, junglee powers the used & refurbished business. P.S: In India, all Amazon listing are third party, since legally foreign investment is not permitted in ecommerce, so Amazon.in actually just functions as a marketplace not a retailer.
- djhworld 10y agoBuying things I know I want is very easy, but "Window Shopping" or just general browsing is painful on Amazon. I didn't even bother with the Amazon end of year sale, too much noise.
- Pxtl 10y agoYeah, there used to be a clearer deliniation between Amazon marketplace and the "official" Amazon store... But now the Amazon store is polluted with sellers gouging on otherwise out-of-stock products and bad high-shipping-cost deals. I realize this has basically allowed Amazon to crush eBay, but they've left the door open for another seller to come along and offer properly curated products.
- izacus 10y agoThis is about 15x more frustrating here in EU - most of the result hits here now say "Will not deliver to your country", since small German mom-and-pop electronics stores mostly refuse to ship outside the country. Before that, Amazon was my primary go-to for shopping, now it's a cesspool of duplicated entries I can't even order. Of course they don't have a filter to show me only things that are shippable to me. Even if they can say it when I click on an item.