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This is the second "Find X on Amazon more easily" sites that I've come across in the last week or so (the last was a USB hub filtering site). Including eBay in
by mdip 7y ago
This is the second "Find X on Amazon more easily" sites that I've come across in the last week or so (the last was a USB hub filtering site). Including eBay in the mix, it's the third such site[0].
I love these sites. It's just sad that it's difficult-to-near-impossible to actually use Amazon (or eBay) for the exact same purpose. The perfect example hit me, yesterday. I wanted a new A/C adapter for my Thinkpad. It's a USB-C laptop, so simple, right? Start with a search. OK, there's a lot of A/C adapters, and a lot of USB-C adapters for phones. In the mix is one or two (over-priced, non-OEM) adapters.
Let's try the A/C adapters category, maybe I can click into that and filter based on the metadata? First, find the category. A few minutes later, settle on something somewhat close. This shouldn't be too difficult; this thing can be powered by anything 60W or higher that supports USB-PD and has a USB-C end on it. Nope. Not a single filter and a few thousand results are returned[1].
Product properties/metadata are so important -- why are so many important bits of data completely missing/unavailable to me while trying to find what I need? I feel like Amazon and eBay have managed to recreate the experience of shopping at a Walmart Super Center online -- a store full of products, organized by some magician, in order to make a 2 minute purchase require 20 minutes of browsing. I guess I don't have to roll the dice picking a check-out line that might move quickly, but outside of that, the experience is so bad that I have a solid four or five things I need to buy which I've attempted to find and simply given up.
And it used to be that you could find other shops online that were more narrow in their product categories (but not selection in said categories) and offered better options for filtering and finding the precise item you were looking for. Many of those are gone, now. The ones that remain all use a handful of off-the-shelf cart software and are often worse for finding products[2] or the price is so much worse that you end up finding the product and searching for its specific part number on Amazon.
I have to say, though, I clicked this link because I have been putting off purchasing an NVMe SSD drive. So thank you to whomever is responsible for this site; that was very helpful in getting me to pull the trigger.
In a more perfect world, a site designed to make it possible to filter available products by a set of incredibly important, common properties which is directly tied to the site who's job it is to sell you the actual products wouldn't even exist. In this world, it gets over 250 upvotes and has more than 160 comments after being on HN for about 13 hours.
[0] https://labgopher.com https://labgopher.com
[1] Unless, of course, I decide to sort by anything other than "Featured" whatever-the-heck-that-means, then there's 150 or so.
[2] NewEgg does a better job than Amazon, but too often a filter will eliminate a set of products because they refer to a common property of a product by a different name; I can tolerate that, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to so frequently.