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Ask HN: Is amazon broken for anyone else?
I don’t shop all that often, but when I do, it’s not a great experience.
Sponsored ads rule Amazon along with irrelevant search results. The clutter of options and the overwhelming amount of choices often lead me down a rabbit hole of reviews and comparisons, increasing the time to buy.
And it's not just Amazon. Whether it's electronics on Best Buy, clothes on various e-commerce platforms, or groceries on Instacart, the problem persists: a flood of options, inconsistent pricing, and a lack of personalized recommendations that understand my needs and preferences.
And now there’s the rise of influencer + social media shopping, where people follow an influencer and trust their recommendations and buy their product lines. While this trend does offer a new avenue for product discovery and selection, I find myself hesitant, lacking a trusted influencer whose recommendations align perfectly with my purchasing decisions.
But even with all the complexity of online shopping, I think it ultimately boils down to 3 steps.
1) Research what to buy - this can happen by brute force reading many product listings or by going on other sites like Reddit, Wirecutter, ect.
2) Then, compare options across different platforms, a step eaten into by sites like Amazon, who not only compete with but undercut independent merchants by offering their own products at lower prices.
3) Settle on one and buy
I wanted to build something that I could trust to get me to step 3 faster, while still doing all of the research and cross-platform product comparison, which take up the lion’s share of time. That’s why I built Claros: https://claros.so/, my attempt at solving this problem and building an AI shopping assistant that can help me buy the random purchases that accrue from living life.
Now, my ramble ends and I find myself back to the original question: how do you shop online? Would Claros help you? If not, how can I make it better?
thanks
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoI think you should change this to ShowHN since you are promoting a thing you built and are not genuinely Asking HN something.
- ammarsafdari 3y agoOk, I'll make that change, sorry about that.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoI don’t work here :) its just usually the way those are done.
- floxy 3y agoAdding to that, with all of the various third parties, and co-mingling of inventory on Amazon, I don't feel like the odds are good that I'm not getting a counterfeit item. No way would I trust a food/vitamin or anything that touches food from Amazon. So I try to only buy books from Amazon, but even that must be getting pretty bad, since I just came across this disclaimer as the very first sentence of a book's description: "All legitimate copies of VDGF produced by Princeton University Press are crisply printed on high-quality paper. If you obtain a shoddily printed copy, it's a fake: please return it and purchase a genuine PUP copy." https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Differential-Geometry-Forms-Mathematical/dp/0691203709/ https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Differential-Geometry-Forms-Ma...
- ammarsafdari 3y agoThat's so funny you mention that because I literally made a specialized version of Claros for supplements and Vitamin research. What do you think? It still uses amazon, but also other merchants on the backend. The nice thing it does is explain all the effects of the ingredients that go into the supplement from scientific literature. https://www.claros.so/supplements https://www.claros.so/supplements