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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It was a weird model. As close to a physical manifestation of the front page of Amazon.com as you can get, which doesn't really translate very well to the retail experience people are used to. Like, I have never in my life randomly gone to Amazon, browsed around their site, clicked through different categories, found something I liked and bought it. Their entire experience starts and ends at the search bar, and that's impossible to replicate in the physical world.

It will be interesting to see how their grocery and convenience stores fare. I have some Amazon Go stores nearby and they never seem too busy.

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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 promoted, clone or amazon brands. It's rare that i can find what I'm looking for without getting creative.

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?”

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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)_/¯

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.

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

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!

> I have never in my life randomly gone to Amazon, browsed around their site, clicked through different categories, found something I liked and bought it.

Guilty as charged on consumerism front, but I do exactly this on black fridays.

Assuming that "Amazon Go" is the mini store with no cashiers, I used to get lunch there sometimes before the pandemic. Worked well, was a good experience. The email receipt would tell you how many minutes and seconds you'd spent in the store; it was trivially easy to get in and out in less than 2 minutes without trying to rush at all.

before the pandemic, we used to gamify that at work -- who could go to the store, buy $x, and get out in the least amount of time!

definitely a gimmicky thing to put on the receipt, but I do miss these little "fun" things

I get you, but this is not the experience they are trying to recreate, they are trying to recreate the very experience you said the website is lacking by using the algorithm and data from there online sales to decide what it should sell in the first place.

This seems like the opposite for me... every time I've walked into an Amazon Books I've found at least one thing that I've wanted to buy

So much easier than hunting through a Barnes and Noble or doom-scrolling through online listings

Argos in the U.K. replicates this pretty well

Just in case people have never seen this business, they've got a lot of stuff but it's all on racks accessible only to employees. For customers the experience is there are a lot of catalogs (these days electronic) listing everything they have, you pick what you want (now just touching it on the screen, but historically you write a number on a form) and then you go see a member of staff, they take your payment and meanwhile your items are fetched from the stores. The catalogs are also available to take home (and these days they're a web site).

The biggest difference to Amazon is after I pick that I want an HDMI cable, a garden trowel and a high temperature incandescent bulb for an oven, it says ready to pick up in 5 minutes and I can walk to the store (five minutes) and get it with no delivery surcharge. Also I could pay cash (but I don't).

Obviously if you live 2+ hours from an Argos, Amazon is starting to look more competitive, but in the UK who lives two hours from an Argos? I don't buy much from Amazon.

Yeah I really like it. It’s like Amazon but faster and without all the counterfeit junk.

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