I'm sick of spending hours researching shit just to find something decent, whether it's screwdrivers or thermostats or lightbulbs.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.