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I can quite easily reproduce the Amazon search bar by walking into a local high street pound shop. Their search is incredibly poor, skewing strongly towards pro

I can quite easily reproduce the Amazon search bar by walking into a local high street pound shop. Their search is incredibly poor, skewing strongly towards promoted, clone or amazon brands. It's rare that i can find what I'm looking for without getting creative.

dwighttk 5y ago
Yeah but do you get “I see you have begun a collection of every pair of headphones ever made, would you like to add these three pairs to your cart to round out your purchase?”
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Yeah, I never got how that was supposed to work, exactly. Like, if I just bought a TV, I'm probably not going to buy another one for a while, so, don't keep showing me all the TVs I didn't buy. At least show me stuff like sound bars, mounting hardware, TV stands, etc. Even with consumables, where it makes sense to show me literally the exact same thing I just bought, maybe wait a while until those things might have actually been, you know, consumed? As always, I'm sure the explanation for why their search engine and recommendations are so bad is either that they don't think it would make them enough more money to be worth it to improve them. An even more sinister thought would be that they think it would make them less money to give consumers better recommendations. I'm not sure which it is, TBH.
  - quesera 5y ago
    > Like, if I just bought a TV, I'm probably not going to buy another one for a while, so, don't keep showing me all the TVs I didn't buy. Counterintuitively, you're wrong about this! Some astronomical number of Amazon purchases are returned. Like 10 or 15%. So anyone who has just bought a TV is extremely likely (compared to the ambient) to be buying a TV right now. It's algorithms all the way down.
    - mattkrause 5y ago
      I can sorta believe that, but... If you're not returning the TV, this useless recommendation trains you to ignore the suggestions altogether. This must have some cost, but it's not one the algorithm can directly track, so it never gets priced into the recommendations.
      - quesera 5y ago
        I don't return items often. I frontload the research, if the purchase is significant or important. But when I do consider returning an item due to dissatisfaction (not DOA or damage), I definitely research other options before initiating the return. This much makes sense to me.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Sure, but in that case, they also have information about whether I've returned the TV or not. If I haven't, it doesn't make nearly as much sense to keep recommending me TVs. Even if your ML algorithm thinks I'm going to return it, it still seems like you'd do better on a percentage basis to keep showing me sound bars, HDMI cables, and other accessories. After all, I bought a TV because I intended to buy a TV. That means I'm probably going to need some of those things to go with it, likely with far greater than 10-15% probability. I suppose there's a possibility that your ML algorithm could decide that the profit from selling a TV so greatly exceeds that of the accessories that a 10-15% probability of preserving the sale in case of a return might be more worth it, but I don't really know the ins and outs of retail ecommerce to make a judgement there. It still just seems silly to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - quesera 5y ago
        I agree, intuitively that makes much more sense. At a minimum, you should get some portion of accessories vs replacement items in your recommendations. I'd be blown away with surprise to learn that AMZN hasn't optimized for revenue in the calculation though, so it seems likely that we're wrong. Of course we'd prefer AMZN to optimize for customer happiness/benefit instead. To me, the "smart" approach would be to recommend accessories until and unless the customer shows some signal indicating that they are looking for another TV. Then switch to full replacement strategy (or even return-minimization strategy) mode. That or similar logical approach may have been abandoned after getting better results (by some metric) from the ML-optimized approach. Assuming there's a human involved at all.
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    With how painless Amazon generally makes returns for regular customers, I could see it being a viable alternative to in-person browsing for one to buy several different brands of item and just return all but the least cheap-feeling one
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  I dread watching random videos on YouTube for the same reason. No, I have not suddenly kindled an ongoing interest in unclogging sinks! And I just wanted to see that one Billie Eilish song my kid mentioned…and no more!

dwighttk 5y ago

Yeah but do you get “I see you have begun a collection of every pair of headphones ever made, would you like to add these three pairs to your cart to round out your purchase?”

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Yeah, I never got how that was supposed to work, exactly. Like, if I just bought a TV, I'm probably not going to buy another one for a while, so, don't keep showing me all the TVs I didn't buy. At least show me stuff like sound bars, mounting hardware, TV stands, etc. Even with consumables, where it makes sense to show me literally the exact same thing I just bought, maybe wait a while until those things might have actually been, you know, consumed? As always, I'm sure the explanation for why their search engine and recommendations are so bad is either that they don't think it would make them enough more money to be worth it to improve them. An even more sinister thought would be that they think it would make them less money to give consumers better recommendations. I'm not sure which it is, TBH.
- quesera 5y ago
  > Like, if I just bought a TV, I'm probably not going to buy another one for a while, so, don't keep showing me all the TVs I didn't buy. Counterintuitively, you're wrong about this! Some astronomical number of Amazon purchases are returned. Like 10 or 15%. So anyone who has just bought a TV is extremely likely (compared to the ambient) to be buying a TV right now. It's algorithms all the way down.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    I can sorta believe that, but... If you're not returning the TV, this useless recommendation trains you to ignore the suggestions altogether. This must have some cost, but it's not one the algorithm can directly track, so it never gets priced into the recommendations.
    - quesera 5y ago
      I don't return items often. I frontload the research, if the purchase is significant or important. But when I do consider returning an item due to dissatisfaction (not DOA or damage), I definitely research other options before initiating the return. This much makes sense to me.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Sure, but in that case, they also have information about whether I've returned the TV or not. If I haven't, it doesn't make nearly as much sense to keep recommending me TVs. Even if your ML algorithm thinks I'm going to return it, it still seems like you'd do better on a percentage basis to keep showing me sound bars, HDMI cables, and other accessories. After all, I bought a TV because I intended to buy a TV. That means I'm probably going to need some of those things to go with it, likely with far greater than 10-15% probability. I suppose there's a possibility that your ML algorithm could decide that the profit from selling a TV so greatly exceeds that of the accessories that a 10-15% probability of preserving the sale in case of a return might be more worth it, but I don't really know the ins and outs of retail ecommerce to make a judgement there. It still just seems silly to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - quesera 5y ago
      I agree, intuitively that makes much more sense. At a minimum, you should get some portion of accessories vs replacement items in your recommendations. I'd be blown away with surprise to learn that AMZN hasn't optimized for revenue in the calculation though, so it seems likely that we're wrong. Of course we'd prefer AMZN to optimize for customer happiness/benefit instead. To me, the "smart" approach would be to recommend accessories until and unless the customer shows some signal indicating that they are looking for another TV. Then switch to full replacement strategy (or even return-minimization strategy) mode. That or similar logical approach may have been abandoned after getting better results (by some metric) from the ML-optimized approach. Assuming there's a human involved at all.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  With how painless Amazon generally makes returns for regular customers, I could see it being a viable alternative to in-person browsing for one to buy several different brands of item and just return all but the least cheap-feeling one
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
I dread watching random videos on YouTube for the same reason. No, I have not suddenly kindled an ongoing interest in unclogging sinks! And I just wanted to see that one Billie Eilish song my kid mentioned…and no more!