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Amazon search and non amazonbasics products are approaching garbage-level. How about half a page of advertising to buy some Chinese knockoff of a product that

by ixacto 8y ago

Amazon search and non amazonbasics products are approaching garbage-level. How about half a page of advertising to buy some Chinese knockoff of a product that will break in a month. My mom wanted some new lighting Apple headphones (earpods). Good luck finding actual Apple products on there. I bought them from B&H instead. No tax + free faster shipping.

jclardy 8y ago
Exactly. I was looking for a waterproof iPhone case. Finding a "reputable" brand on Amazon is near impossible now - their search results bring up pages and pages of the same rebranded knockoffs. Any camera or electronics gear I order now comes from B&H or dare I say it - Best Buy. Better shipping options, better return options and just easier to find items overall. This is coming from a prime subscriber of years now.
hakfoo 8y ago
Amazon's search has always been terrible in at least some verticals. Computer hardware, for example. I decided I wanted a GTX 1080 recently, and I gave Amazon's search a swing in case I was missing something that pcpartpicker didn't grab. Search "GTX 1080" from their home page. First two results are aftermarket coolers, then we start seeing cards. Okay, let's filter to just a price range likely to be cards... $300-500. The first result is technically in range at $499, but flagged "You can't buy this because you don't have Prime." The second is $661. Yes, technically there's a "used or something from $499.99." in the corner, but it smells like they've ignored the filtering entirely unless you want to play hunt the pixel. If I do a step further "sort by price", it still sorts by the cheapest third-party used price and then shows the new price in big figures, leaving the results seemingly unsorted. You then see a disclaimer "Showing selected results. See all results for gtx 1080." WTH is "selected results?" My consumer sense is tingling-- are they trying to steer me into higher-margin items? Okay, I'll select "see all". The first result is a Vega 56, the second a 1060. And this is why I bought from Newegg. That and they had a no-gimmicks model for $430. What went wrong? * Product categorization is a mess. I have to wonder if this is third party vendors keyword stuffing their listings for a "GTX 1050 not 1060 1070 1070TI 1080" or just some overly aggressive matching. In other searches, I've seen a related problem-- the same item repeated with marginally different listings. * New/refurb/open box/etc. really need to be seperate SKUs. Books and DVDs, the used choice is a reasonable substitute, but on a ~$400 product where warranty is a purchasing factor, you can't really bundle them together. * Filter and sort needs to work how you'd expect it. On the big price number. Maybe that means they have to do things like spinning out new/used/refurb as suggested, and maybe the "$A, also available from $B" phrasing needs rework.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  This is basically it. The day that Amazon decided they needed to be a "marketplace" instead of a trusted, authoritative, price-competitive retailer is when they started their slide, to me. If I wanted to hunt, compare (deceptive) pricing, read fine print, make sure shipping is reasonable, worry about needing a refund, I would have just searched on Google and gone through all the rando e-commerce sites that popped up. I used to go to Amazon because I knew that, while they might not have the thing I wanted, if I found it, it was the right thing, the price was reasonable, and I'd be able to get it in a reasonable amount of time. These days I barely see a difference between shopping on Amazon and Ebay. The only possible exception might be books.

by ixacto 8y ago

jclardy 8y ago

Exactly. I was looking for a waterproof iPhone case. Finding a "reputable" brand on Amazon is near impossible now - their search results bring up pages and pages of the same rebranded knockoffs. Any camera or electronics gear I order now comes from B&H or dare I say it - Best Buy. Better shipping options, better return options and just easier to find items overall. This is coming from a prime subscriber of years now.

hakfoo 8y ago

Amazon's search has always been terrible in at least some verticals. Computer hardware, for example. I decided I wanted a GTX 1080 recently, and I gave Amazon's search a swing in case I was missing something that pcpartpicker didn't grab. Search "GTX 1080" from their home page. First two results are aftermarket coolers, then we start seeing cards. Okay, let's filter to just a price range likely to be cards... $300-500. The first result is technically in range at $499, but flagged "You can't buy this because you don't have Prime." The second is $661. Yes, technically there's a "used or something from $499.99." in the corner, but it smells like they've ignored the filtering entirely unless you want to play hunt the pixel. If I do a step further "sort by price", it still sorts by the cheapest third-party used price and then shows the new price in big figures, leaving the results seemingly unsorted. You then see a disclaimer "Showing selected results. See all results for gtx 1080." WTH is "selected results?" My consumer sense is tingling-- are they trying to steer me into higher-margin items? Okay, I'll select "see all". The first result is a Vega 56, the second a 1060. And this is why I bought from Newegg. That and they had a no-gimmicks model for $430. What went wrong? * Product categorization is a mess. I have to wonder if this is third party vendors keyword stuffing their listings for a "GTX 1050 not 1060 1070 1070TI 1080" or just some overly aggressive matching. In other searches, I've seen a related problem-- the same item repeated with marginally different listings. * New/refurb/open box/etc. really need to be seperate SKUs. Books and DVDs, the used choice is a reasonable substitute, but on a ~$400 product where warranty is a purchasing factor, you can't really bundle them together. * Filter and sort needs to work how you'd expect it. On the big price number. Maybe that means they have to do things like spinning out new/used/refurb as suggested, and maybe the "$A, also available from $B" phrasing needs rework.

wool_gather 8y ago
This is basically it. The day that Amazon decided they needed to be a "marketplace" instead of a trusted, authoritative, price-competitive retailer is when they started their slide, to me. If I wanted to hunt, compare (deceptive) pricing, read fine print, make sure shipping is reasonable, worry about needing a refund, I would have just searched on Google and gone through all the rando e-commerce sites that popped up. I used to go to Amazon because I knew that, while they might not have the thing I wanted, if I found it, it was the right thing, the price was reasonable, and I'd be able to get it in a reasonable amount of time. These days I barely see a difference between shopping on Amazon and Ebay. The only possible exception might be books.