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Comment by tetromino_ | Hacker News Reader

> everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites

Slow compared to what? Amazon's website feels more responsive and more usable than 90% of online stores I've seen that carry orders of magnitude less variety of inventory. It loads fast, searches fast, provides for easy navigation between related products, and displays all needed information on one page without jank. Sure, it doesn't look modern, but it feels far more functional than the competition.

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Though the filtering features are pretty much useless for almost every product. Too many products to maintain any decent classification. That makes it pretty much useless for looking for computer hardware (that and counterfeit products).

So true, but I don't think it's impossible to maintain classification, that's just Amazon. I think they just gave up trying to, probably after they opened up up other sellers.

I suspect their search, classification, filters etc are all so broken because it's all based on a Google-style textual search, with no backend database driving those site features.

Pricespy had excellent filters for the produxts they listed, though I guess it was more focused than amazon. I would say maintaining is possible, especially if they let retailers define the fields and responsible for filling them for the products they list.

Yet they could do much worse. By just not having multiple options merged into one item makes them better than the disaster that's eBay. In comparison they're not useless, because someone is doing it even worse.

Their local competitors in my country are so much better, and amazon shipping is so slow, I don't know anybody that actually uses amazon except for AWS.

Except it's full of terrible fakr products and shady overseas businesses and shady company policies which often screw the customer over and fake reviews everywhere. Tons of crap products that will break or not work instantly and shady companies who refuse to give a refund unless you provide a 5 star review. Their delivery service and prime is also a rip off, it's literally no longer worth it.

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