7 ms·

I don't know about anyone else, but Amazon.com's recommendations for me are laughably bad. "You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the n

by dimva 8y ago

I don't know about anyone else, but Amazon.com's recommendations for me are laughably bad. "You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!" I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Why would anyone want to use the same algorithms?

sbr464 8y ago
I tend to agree regarding the home page content, but I’ve found the “customers also bought” sections quite helpful lately, especially when looking at industrial/technical products.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- goldenkey 8y ago
  Unfortunately the customers also bought section is not really "recommendations" as much as a table join.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - cheeze 8y ago
    That is a rather simplistic view of it
    - goldenkey 8y ago
      Its not my view, that's what it is. No machine learning is necessary to generate that section. Just a lot of intersected purchases from a huge amount of customers, sorted by frequency.
      - imustbeevil 8y ago
        Do you work at Amazon, so you know this is how it works? Or are you projecting how you imagine it works? Because if I'm an Amazon dev I'm 100% not just showing a 45 year old woman who buys a TV the same "other people bought" as a 25 year old man. I'd definitely run the same ML on each section, because the whole point is to understand the closeness of connections between personal traits and purchases, and it is impossible for a human to outperform in that task.
        goldenkey 8y ago
        I used to work at Amazon. Demographics aren't needed when you have a ton of customers for which to take the intersection, and sort by weighted (frequency, time of purchase.) Any non related purchases won't show up nearly as often or close in purchase date as related ones on a large sample of customers. This is just a consequence of having big data, which makes the noise floor insignificant. ML shouldn't be thrown at everything indiscriminately.
  - harshaw 8y ago
    This was the collaborative filtering of 15 years ago. It's likely they have made improvements since then.
  - GrinningFool 8y ago
    I also find it a much more helpful section than 'recommendations'. Something simpler is more effective in this case, in that it gives me much more relevant results. Why is that unfortunate?
camtarn 8y ago
Perhaps you're a dev working for an ecommerce company, and your CEO has just sent an email down the line saying "hey, Amazon has recommendations and they're a successful shop, so we should have recommendations too!" - and you want the simplest way to get the job done and move onto something more useful. Or perhaps you think they might work well for your particular sales domain. They clearly don't work very well for product categories with lots of different items which fulfil the same purpose (e.g. one thousand kettles, of which you only need one, or one thousand TVs) but they might work great for funny slogan T-shirts or for board games.
- masonic 8y ago
  "hey, Amazon has recommendations and they're a successful shop, so we should have recommendations too!" Sounds like Groupon, who sends me 10 emails a week pushing Smog Check vouchers... which I need once every 24 months at most.
- option_greek 8y ago
  Several e-commerce and logistics companies avoid using AWS/anything amazon for the simple reason of not giving more dollars to their competitor. I have seen this in my current and last company with this as stated reason.
tehlike 8y ago
Showing you them is indeed more profitable. That's why they show it.
charlieegan3 8y ago
I think this is because people who buy batteries are likely to buy them again soon, at least more likely than any other product. Maybe you bought the wrong type, maybe you need more than you thought? I read a good post about this using washing machines as an example but I can't find it.
- altairiumblue 8y ago
  They have all the data. They should be able to do better than this.
tnolet 8y ago
I have a Kindle. I read mostly hard science fiction and popular science. However, Amazon’s recommendation thing always shows me women’s romance novels, Danish crime and period dramas.
kuu 8y ago
I think the main problem comes when you already bought them... I mean, I understand Amazon shows me a washing machine while I'm searching for one and I clicked on several without buying, but not when I already bought one! It's not something I would buy every other week...
bambax 8y ago
Came here to say this. I've been an Amazon customer for a very long time (2003). I don't think I have ever bought anything from one of their recommendations, that are, as you say, only based on your most recent purchases and that assume, for some reason, that you need another version of what you just bought. If I just bought a big pack of batteries I won't be needing batteries for a long time; and they should know this because they know that I buy batteries every 18 months or so. Also, I don't have a dog, I have never bought anything pet related on Amazon (or any other website for that matter) and yet they keep suggesting pet food. Amazon recommendation engine is abysmally bad. Picking a random item from my orders history would be just as good and so much simpler to implement.
- kwanbix 8y ago
  Off topic, but if you need to buy batteries each 18 months, I hihgly recommend you rechargeables.
  - jcims 8y ago
    When making this switch its best to commit. Spend $40 on a good recharger then buy 64 rechargeable AA batteries. I did the same about eight years ago and couldn’t believe how quickly my cache of batteries got eaten up by random devices and accessories and toys. I actually had to buy more, BUT! the change was complete and I didn’t need to buy alkalines anymore (till my kiddo came down with a case of type 1 diabetes and we needed them for her insulin pump). Everything else gets eneloops and the ones I bought back then still seem to be going strong.
masonic 8y ago
Other customers who bought 'AA Batteries one third gross' also bought: "Long Dong Silver vibrator" "Jewel Cannabis Delivery Inhaler" ...
voidifremoved 8y ago
My personal favourite was when my partner bought a book on breastfeeding through my account, and for weeks afterwards my recommendations were full of erotic novels.
ignoramous 8y ago
> You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!" Patrick explained it why it might be like so: https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209 https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209 (thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html ) > I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Amazon does various forms of recommendations (no way limited to just recent purchases) based on 1. Purchases 2. Searches 3. Browsing history (via trackers, ads, affiliate links) 4. Activities (on their digital devices, tagging things on their websites in wishlist, adding preferences in your account etc) 5. Global and Local trends (people in your area/country buy..., people with similar buying pattern buy..., It's Eid and you're Muslim, so you buy...) ...And probably many other signals I might be missing. They must have got pretty good people working with this and enough data to get their models right. Also, Amazon makes decisions on new retail businesses to start depending on those signals. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-brands-are-killing-it-says-new-report/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-bran... That, and considering the fact that Amazon has an unshakeable culture of making data-driven decisions for everything it does... I guess what I'm trying to say is, Amazon and its subsidiaries may not be as dumb at AI/ML as it might seem to be by gauging against one datapoint. Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre-pregnant-and-thats-not-all.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre-pregnan...
- devit 8y ago
  That seems to miss the fact that if you buy a fridge on Amazon and decide to return it, you are most likely going to look for another fridge on Amazon regardless of whether Amazon puts fridges in the recommendation section or not, since you already know you need a fridge and that Amazon sells fridges. My only explanations are that that kind of thing happens when they can't figure out anything good to recommend.
- sigi45 8y ago
  They should. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps the best they can do, is to recommend to all of us the same/similiar product again because thats the only thing they got working: Catching those x percent of people who send the tv back and buy the second recommended one.
darawk 8y ago
I'm really surprised to see this sentiment echo'd so much on here. I find Amazon's suggestions for me to be incredibly good, though mostly with respect to books. Do other people feel their book recommendations are excellent, but not so much for other products? Am I alone in this?
- DanBC 8y ago
  The book recommendations are good. Everything else sucks though.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    I suspect that's because it's fueled more by people than pure algo, as in take into account what other people with this book have in their library etc.
- Numberwang 8y ago
  I'm in the 'laughably bad' camp. If I buy a camping backpack they should show me other camping gear or trekking shoes or whatever, not more backpacks.
thegabriele 8y ago
My theory regarding this it's the following: I helped for a while in a family related retail business and there was a lot of need for consumable products like pens/papers etc or just barcode scanners/toners and so on... Recommending for similar products at the end of a purchase raised awareness towards those items for the next inevitable batches. I believe amazon wants its own brands to win or otherwise a strong competition among others producers. I can't believe it's just math.
DanCarvajal 8y ago
I am constantly recommended MAGA Hats, it started out as silly but now it's very annoying.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
Amazon indeed seem to be very proud of their "more of the same" algorithm. It occasionally recommends me useful books but they seem to mix in a lot of stuff that they are just looking to sell opportunistically. They also inexplicably include products that I've bought already; from them. Also they seem confused about things like book series. Why would I buy part 8 of 30 books where I have never shown any interest in either the author or indeed parts 1-7. I regularly use them to check reviews for things I'm interested in. I quite often end up buying them elsewhere; or not at all. Regardless, this could be a useful service for some but I do think you would need to worry about things like GDPR if you are planning to offer this to amazon. I'm assuming they've thought this through and are providing ways for companies to use this without getting in trouble. For the same reason, I'm pretty sure that Amazon is going to be very careful not exposing themselves to legal trouble here as that could become very expensive for them. So, I'm not so concerned with them trying to grab the data for their own purposes.

by dimva 8y ago

sbr464 8y ago

I tend to agree regarding the home page content, but I’ve found the “customers also bought” sections quite helpful lately, especially when looking at industrial/technical products.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
goldenkey 8y ago
Unfortunately the customers also bought section is not really "recommendations" as much as a table join.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cheeze 8y ago
  That is a rather simplistic view of it
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    Its not my view, that's what it is. No machine learning is necessary to generate that section. Just a lot of intersected purchases from a huge amount of customers, sorted by frequency.
    - imustbeevil 8y ago
      Do you work at Amazon, so you know this is how it works? Or are you projecting how you imagine it works? Because if I'm an Amazon dev I'm 100% not just showing a 45 year old woman who buys a TV the same "other people bought" as a 25 year old man. I'd definitely run the same ML on each section, because the whole point is to understand the closeness of connections between personal traits and purchases, and it is impossible for a human to outperform in that task.
      - goldenkey 8y ago
        I used to work at Amazon. Demographics aren't needed when you have a ton of customers for which to take the intersection, and sort by weighted (frequency, time of purchase.) Any non related purchases won't show up nearly as often or close in purchase date as related ones on a large sample of customers. This is just a consequence of having big data, which makes the noise floor insignificant. ML shouldn't be thrown at everything indiscriminately.
- harshaw 8y ago
  This was the collaborative filtering of 15 years ago. It's likely they have made improvements since then.
- GrinningFool 8y ago
  I also find it a much more helpful section than 'recommendations'. Something simpler is more effective in this case, in that it gives me much more relevant results. Why is that unfortunate?

camtarn 8y ago

Perhaps you're a dev working for an ecommerce company, and your CEO has just sent an email down the line saying "hey, Amazon has recommendations and they're a successful shop, so we should have recommendations too!" - and you want the simplest way to get the job done and move onto something more useful. Or perhaps you think they might work well for your particular sales domain. They clearly don't work very well for product categories with lots of different items which fulfil the same purpose (e.g. one thousand kettles, of which you only need one, or one thousand TVs) but they might work great for funny slogan T-shirts or for board games.

masonic 8y ago
"hey, Amazon has recommendations and they're a successful shop, so we should have recommendations too!" Sounds like Groupon, who sends me 10 emails a week pushing Smog Check vouchers... which I need once every 24 months at most.
option_greek 8y ago
Several e-commerce and logistics companies avoid using AWS/anything amazon for the simple reason of not giving more dollars to their competitor. I have seen this in my current and last company with this as stated reason.

tehlike 8y ago

Showing you them is indeed more profitable. That's why they show it.

charlieegan3 8y ago

I think this is because people who buy batteries are likely to buy them again soon, at least more likely than any other product. Maybe you bought the wrong type, maybe you need more than you thought? I read a good post about this using washing machines as an example but I can't find it.

altairiumblue 8y ago
They have all the data. They should be able to do better than this.

tnolet 8y ago

I have a Kindle. I read mostly hard science fiction and popular science. However, Amazon’s recommendation thing always shows me women’s romance novels, Danish crime and period dramas.

kuu 8y ago

I think the main problem comes when you already bought them... I mean, I understand Amazon shows me a washing machine while I'm searching for one and I clicked on several without buying, but not when I already bought one! It's not something I would buy every other week...

bambax 8y ago

Came here to say this. I've been an Amazon customer for a very long time (2003). I don't think I have ever bought anything from one of their recommendations, that are, as you say, only based on your most recent purchases and that assume, for some reason, that you need another version of what you just bought. If I just bought a big pack of batteries I won't be needing batteries for a long time; and they should know this because they know that I buy batteries every 18 months or so. Also, I don't have a dog, I have never bought anything pet related on Amazon (or any other website for that matter) and yet they keep suggesting pet food. Amazon recommendation engine is abysmally bad. Picking a random item from my orders history would be just as good and so much simpler to implement.

kwanbix 8y ago
Off topic, but if you need to buy batteries each 18 months, I hihgly recommend you rechargeables.
- jcims 8y ago
  When making this switch its best to commit. Spend $40 on a good recharger then buy 64 rechargeable AA batteries. I did the same about eight years ago and couldn’t believe how quickly my cache of batteries got eaten up by random devices and accessories and toys. I actually had to buy more, BUT! the change was complete and I didn’t need to buy alkalines anymore (till my kiddo came down with a case of type 1 diabetes and we needed them for her insulin pump). Everything else gets eneloops and the ones I bought back then still seem to be going strong.

masonic 8y ago

Other customers who bought 'AA Batteries one third gross' also bought: "Long Dong Silver vibrator" "Jewel Cannabis Delivery Inhaler" ...

voidifremoved 8y ago

My personal favourite was when my partner bought a book on breastfeeding through my account, and for weeks afterwards my recommendations were full of erotic novels.

ignoramous 8y ago

> You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!" Patrick explained it why it might be like so: https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209 https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209 (thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html ) > I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Amazon does various forms of recommendations (no way limited to just recent purchases) based on 1. Purchases 2. Searches 3. Browsing history (via trackers, ads, affiliate links) 4. Activities (on their digital devices, tagging things on their websites in wishlist, adding preferences in your account etc) 5. Global and Local trends (people in your area/country buy..., people with similar buying pattern buy..., It's Eid and you're Muslim, so you buy...) ...And probably many other signals I might be missing. They must have got pretty good people working with this and enough data to get their models right. Also, Amazon makes decisions on new retail businesses to start depending on those signals. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-brands-are-killing-it-says-new-report/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-bran... That, and considering the fact that Amazon has an unshakeable culture of making data-driven decisions for everything it does... I guess what I'm trying to say is, Amazon and its subsidiaries may not be as dumb at AI/ML as it might seem to be by gauging against one datapoint. Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre-pregnant-and-thats-not-all.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre-pregnan...

devit 8y ago
That seems to miss the fact that if you buy a fridge on Amazon and decide to return it, you are most likely going to look for another fridge on Amazon regardless of whether Amazon puts fridges in the recommendation section or not, since you already know you need a fridge and that Amazon sells fridges. My only explanations are that that kind of thing happens when they can't figure out anything good to recommend.
sigi45 8y ago
They should. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps the best they can do, is to recommend to all of us the same/similiar product again because thats the only thing they got working: Catching those x percent of people who send the tv back and buy the second recommended one.

darawk 8y ago

I'm really surprised to see this sentiment echo'd so much on here. I find Amazon's suggestions for me to be incredibly good, though mostly with respect to books. Do other people feel their book recommendations are excellent, but not so much for other products? Am I alone in this?

DanBC 8y ago
The book recommendations are good. Everything else sucks though.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  I suspect that's because it's fueled more by people than pure algo, as in take into account what other people with this book have in their library etc.
Numberwang 8y ago
I'm in the 'laughably bad' camp. If I buy a camping backpack they should show me other camping gear or trekking shoes or whatever, not more backpacks.

thegabriele 8y ago

My theory regarding this it's the following: I helped for a while in a family related retail business and there was a lot of need for consumable products like pens/papers etc or just barcode scanners/toners and so on... Recommending for similar products at the end of a purchase raised awareness towards those items for the next inevitable batches. I believe amazon wants its own brands to win or otherwise a strong competition among others producers. I can't believe it's just math.

DanCarvajal 8y ago

I am constantly recommended MAGA Hats, it started out as silly but now it's very annoying.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

Amazon indeed seem to be very proud of their "more of the same" algorithm. It occasionally recommends me useful books but they seem to mix in a lot of stuff that they are just looking to sell opportunistically. They also inexplicably include products that I've bought already; from them. Also they seem confused about things like book series. Why would I buy part 8 of 30 books where I have never shown any interest in either the author or indeed parts 1-7. I regularly use them to check reviews for things I'm interested in. I quite often end up buying them elsewhere; or not at all. Regardless, this could be a useful service for some but I do think you would need to worry about things like GDPR if you are planning to offer this to amazon. I'm assuming they've thought this through and are providing ways for companies to use this without getting in trouble. For the same reason, I'm pretty sure that Amazon is going to be very careful not exposing themselves to legal trouble here as that could become very expensive for them. So, I'm not so concerned with them trying to grab the data for their own purposes.