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Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

I noticed the same thing. The front page is so boring it feels like a regular stores website. I don't know about the rest of their users but I don't come to ebay to buy sunglasses or phones. I'm looking for that obscure adapter that no store in the country sells. Or that game I used to play that has long since gone out of production. I can still find that stuff but there is no way to just casually look around at the interesting bits, you have to search for it.

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To be fair, Amazon has 10 years of purchase history on my account, and they can't manage to put up anything on the home page that I'm interested in. Personally, I'm very much starting to doubt algorithmic recommendations for shopping sites. They work for books and music, but as Amazon has morphed into offering everything they can't recommend anything decent. I just get the same generic recommendations for products similar to my last few purchases, similar to Google advertising products that I've already searched for and bought. Adtech has promised a lot, but in my experience it hasn't delivered on most of those promises.

Oddly, I find the ebay homepage more useful, since it also displays a selection of products from sellers I watch, and has figured out I have a fetish for vintage test equipment. I don't think I've ever bought anything from the Amazon homepage, but I bought at least 3 items that I saw on the eBay homepage (from sellers I watched) in the last year. This relies on active participation from the user, however, and benefits people who have used the site for a long time. And I can't kid myself, eBay can't grow selling used test equipment and motorcycle parts, but they still do the online sale of unique items better than anyone else.

I do miss the 'rummage sale' aspect though, it's now nearly impossible to browse and find weird items, you have to just search for specific items rather than browse.

My housemate recently got a suggestion for a food processor dash button

Haha, brilliant. A good example of "AI" gone wrong. I wonder whether Amazon's recommender has a flag for durable goods, and if so, how it failed.

Perhaps Amazon knows something about planned obsolescence that the consumer does not.

Yes all I get is products I have already brought - yes I have brought that RPG supplement No I am not going to buy it again why even bother sending me that email or suggesting it?

Interestingly, the Chinese equivalent of eBay (taobao) does an extremely good job of recommendations for me. So much so that if I search for something, and can't quite find what I'm looking for, often the exact thing I was looking for is a recommendation the next day (or a better version I didn't know exists).

My suspicion is that they have teams of "professional shoppers" seeding the AI algorithms.

You don't need to doubt algorithmic shopping suggestions and just say they are absolutely worthless. It's amazing how much effort has been put into that concept throughout the industry and it is universally junk. They might as well simplify it: pick ten categories of items you have bought from, pick a random item from each.

That's like ten lines of code, done. It won't be any less useful than what they are doing now

I guess this is what they've needed to do to scale their revenue. A quick google search shows that eBay did about $9B in the US last year whereas Heritage Auctions, one of the premier auction sites for high-end collectibles and luxury items, only did about $900M in revenue. So there's plenty of money to be made peddling generic bullshit.

I think the issue is that many people use eBay less than sites like Amazon or AliExpress where you're out to pick a product - I used to use ebay quite often for buying things like phone cases and electronics components directly from China.

Now I choose AliExpress when I want it cheaper and Amazon when I want it faster. eBay has lost a lot of marketshare in this space - yes, there's business in auctioning collectibles and second hand stuff, but it's much smaller than that direct purchase market and they'd likely have to scale back the site in some respects.

Their front page should be just a search box.

Maybe that signals they need to work on site UX and AI to present useful purchases in a more consistent buying experience than an atomized encyclopedia galactica that drowns the user in a paradox of choice?

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