5 ms·

Sigh. So true. Curation is an important part of any retail experience. I don't need a thousand "brands" for a product. I need to know what the top few are, so

Sigh. So true. Curation is an important part of any retail experience. I don't need a thousand "brands" for a product. I need to know what the top few are, so I can choose well. I hate the fact that there are a relatively small number of actual manufacturers of some classes of product, and then a massive fragmentation of "brands" that are just the same things, repackaged. On Amazon, the brand is Amazon -- because there's a small (and getting smaller) chance you've ever heard of the brand before. So when it comes to trust, our trust relationship is with Amazon. The main thing Amazon has going for it is the liberal return policies -- those transform the lack of trust in the general buying experience into a two-way door.

xvector 5y ago
Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Like headphones.com but for more than just headphones. I'm sick of spending hours researching shit just to find something decent, whether it's screwdrivers or thermostats or lightbulbs.
- ghshephard 5y ago
  I've often wondered if Monoprice (my source for cables for 15+ years) will ever go down the Amazon path of descent into scammers.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    If they get bought out, absolutely. That's what happened to Newegg.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  It's interesting that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. It's a recurring theme throughout history that products or services there were once only available to the wealthiest elite of society eventually trickle down to everyone, often due to improvements in technology. Think of a product, and it was once unavailable to the masses: refined sugar, spices, cars, etc... A significant luxury that the rich enjoy is having personal shoppers that eliminate the hassle of having to wade through this crap themselves, deal with deliveries, and return things if they don't work out. I can imagine a web site that works like that, but utilising efficiencies of scale to bring the cost of this service down to mass-market levels. Affordable by the upper middle class, instead of just the multi-millionaires.
  - foerbert 5y ago
    I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you. The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      Oh, I don't mean a personal personal shopper! As you rightly pointed out, that wouldn't be cost effective, which is why currently only the rich can afford this. I mean what the parent-to-my-post suggested: a curated shopping site, where all products are guaranteed to be high quality, end of story. No fakes. No drop-shipping from untrustworthy suppliers. No bargain basement products. You could do this for basically anything! As a random example, my building was constructed using the cheapest supplier for electrical outlets and switches. Fully half are broken in just a couple of years, and one of them shorted so badly it nearly set the apartment on fire. That's absurdly dangerous, yet they did it to save something like $2 per outlet. I went online and tried to do some research to find a reputable vendor, but I got lost in the sea of options. There is no review that is trustworthy. There's no site I can judge to be reliable by myself. Steve Jobs told his team that all of the Apple products should fit on a table. There shouldn't be fifty models with varying levels of quality. There should just be one of each, the best, end of story. Customers shouldn't have to do research, or figure out which one has flaws that they can tolerate at a preferred price point. Sure, this flies in the face of economic theory, but Apple become the world's biggest company under Jobs' leadership, and their brand is basically magic. Maybe he has a point.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  > Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Those businesses (they used to just be called "stores" or "retailers") are being driven either to transform or out of business by models like Amazon.
- CosmicShadow 5y ago
  The problem is every single site like that turns into an affiliate garbage-fest where you are paying for the "top-rated" item based on the biggest affiliate fee it pays. Sure it looks legit because they only pick what appear to be all high quality items that still pay good affiliate money. Hard to make money otherwise as someone will always see your traffic and make it really worth your while for you to cross the line on recommendations, and hey, since you never meet or see the people who use your site and they'll probably only buy once, why not? You can't really trust any site or article about quality or ratings, because they all exist solely to do this, or it's some random dude's blog that you'll never actually find or believe in anyway. If he does get traffic he decides he wants to make a go at making money, and whoops, there we go again! Of course you could run a real store with inventory and such, but man that's too much work when the other way is so easy.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    This is perfect. Thank you.
- tornato7 5y ago
  https://www.buyforlife.com/ https://www.buyforlife.com/ is one place that's trying to do this, and while their product selection is pretty limited it seems like they're sticking to their principles.
clusterfish 5y ago
Those "free" returns are then packaged onto palettes resold to the highest bidder who extracts a few valuable products, trashing everything else. And none of this is free, it's just included in the price you pay when you buy what would be a $1 item on AliExpress for $10 on Amazon.

xvector 5y ago

Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Like headphones.com but for more than just headphones. I'm sick of spending hours researching shit just to find something decent, whether it's screwdrivers or thermostats or lightbulbs.

ghshephard 5y ago
I've often wondered if Monoprice (my source for cables for 15+ years) will ever go down the Amazon path of descent into scammers.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  If they get bought out, absolutely. That's what happened to Newegg.
jiggawatts 5y ago
It's interesting that I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. It's a recurring theme throughout history that products or services there were once only available to the wealthiest elite of society eventually trickle down to everyone, often due to improvements in technology. Think of a product, and it was once unavailable to the masses: refined sugar, spices, cars, etc... A significant luxury that the rich enjoy is having personal shoppers that eliminate the hassle of having to wade through this crap themselves, deal with deliveries, and return things if they don't work out. I can imagine a web site that works like that, but utilising efficiencies of scale to bring the cost of this service down to mass-market levels. Affordable by the upper middle class, instead of just the multi-millionaires.
- foerbert 5y ago
  I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you. The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Oh, I don't mean a personal personal shopper! As you rightly pointed out, that wouldn't be cost effective, which is why currently only the rich can afford this. I mean what the parent-to-my-post suggested: a curated shopping site, where all products are guaranteed to be high quality, end of story. No fakes. No drop-shipping from untrustworthy suppliers. No bargain basement products. You could do this for basically anything! As a random example, my building was constructed using the cheapest supplier for electrical outlets and switches. Fully half are broken in just a couple of years, and one of them shorted so badly it nearly set the apartment on fire. That's absurdly dangerous, yet they did it to save something like $2 per outlet. I went online and tried to do some research to find a reputable vendor, but I got lost in the sea of options. There is no review that is trustworthy. There's no site I can judge to be reliable by myself. Steve Jobs told his team that all of the Apple products should fit on a table. There shouldn't be fifty models with varying levels of quality. There should just be one of each, the best, end of story. Customers shouldn't have to do research, or figure out which one has flaws that they can tolerate at a preferred price point. Sure, this flies in the face of economic theory, but Apple become the world's biggest company under Jobs' leadership, and their brand is basically magic. Maybe he has a point.
jfrunyon 5y ago
> Honestly, you could probably make a business out of a store that sells only high quality gear. Those businesses (they used to just be called "stores" or "retailers") are being driven either to transform or out of business by models like Amazon.
CosmicShadow 5y ago
The problem is every single site like that turns into an affiliate garbage-fest where you are paying for the "top-rated" item based on the biggest affiliate fee it pays. Sure it looks legit because they only pick what appear to be all high quality items that still pay good affiliate money. Hard to make money otherwise as someone will always see your traffic and make it really worth your while for you to cross the line on recommendations, and hey, since you never meet or see the people who use your site and they'll probably only buy once, why not? You can't really trust any site or article about quality or ratings, because they all exist solely to do this, or it's some random dude's blog that you'll never actually find or believe in anyway. If he does get traffic he decides he wants to make a go at making money, and whoops, there we go again! Of course you could run a real store with inventory and such, but man that's too much work when the other way is so easy.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  This is perfect. Thank you.
tornato7 5y ago
https://www.buyforlife.com/ https://www.buyforlife.com/ is one place that's trying to do this, and while their product selection is pretty limited it seems like they're sticking to their principles.

clusterfish 5y ago

Those "free" returns are then packaged onto palettes resold to the highest bidder who extracts a few valuable products, trashing everything else. And none of this is free, it's just included in the price you pay when you buy what would be a $1 item on AliExpress for $10 on Amazon.