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Comment by enumjorge | Hacker News Reader

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews.

I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipping was fast, and I trusted the quality of what I received. In that world, I could see myself saying my shopping list out lout to an Echo to make things easier.

But in Amazon's current free-for-all marketplace, I would never do that. Now I typically check traditional big box stores first, and only go with Amazon if I can't find what I need elsewhere.

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This. Alexa is a trust-interface. Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, so they sure as hell won’t trust some bot to spend their money for them there.

I just decided not to buy an item from Amazon despite it being cheaper, because I need it and I don’t have time to deal with it being a model from a previous year or whatever the catch may be.

I've owned and used Alex-powered devices for a while and have never spent a dime via that infernal machine. I use it to turn on the radio, change the station, play audible books, stream podcasts, toggle lights, and get the weather.

Hell, I don't even know how to buy anything via Alexa, and the one time I tried "Order some cheerios", it never came.

Alexa doesn't even push me to order things. It does, however, push me to use Amazon Music, which is a total nonstarter for probably everyone.

> Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore

How did you come to this conclusion?

>Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore,

on HN.

I know many many many people that don't give one iota about the things you and I might care about regarding Amazon's "quality". All they care about is that they thing they want is available, fast/free shipping, and at a price they are okay with paying. They don't know one thing about comingling inventory, they don't care about fake reviews, or any of the other things discussed frequently here.

Everyone trusts Amazon until they have a horrible experience.

> on HN.

Really? Because Amazon is on pace to lose $10B this year

Not just Alexa, pretty much all of them. When the speakers first came out I think society was still in the "wow look at these amazing tech companies" phase. After they came out and in the years since the public has shifted their view of these companies from "oh wow look how amazing" to "oh wow look how slimey"

I actually started sorting price from low to high and have found the real price that way. It's interesting to see promoted items $5-10 higher than a similar product thrown randomly in the list

As soon as you do that, the product count will usually drop drastically. They don't want you to see the real list, and won't show it to you.

I've been trying to do that, but as soon as i sort, there is a whole bunch of unrelated stuff for pages... How do you address that?

I suspect they do this on purpose to frustrate you into spending more.

Maybe, but it’s a legitimately hard problem. Sort by lowest price legitimately means show the lowest price item first, even if it’s less relevant.

Based on other search systems I have worked with, they probably have an initial fast filter that limits the items from the entire inventory to a loosely matching set (erring on the side of including irrelevant items). Then a more intelligent and expensive ranking system would be used to find the best items from that set (where “best” means a bunch of things including relevance and profitability). Selecting “price: low to high” probably bypasses the intelligent system, so you end up with crap at the top of the list.

The low-priced items could be doing some kind of SEO scam to get on the list, or it could be something innocent like a fuzzy match to text in the description (could be a dumb issue like tf-idf that randomly exceeds a threshold due to noise).

You could argue that if they don’t prioritize the investment to fix these issues, it’s in some sense intentional. Nobody sorts by low price, because it gives poor results, because they don’t bother fixing it, because it’s not a priority, because nobody sorts by low price…

> erring on the side of including irrelevant items

This is the reason for this problem. When searching for 'cat' and sorting by lowest price, the first promoted item doesn't contain the word cat and neither does the first actual result (but they are cat items).

If they didn't hoist 'legitimately hard' problems onto themselves, maybe they wouldn't need to solve them.

You can’t buy cats on Amazon, this is a poor example. But if you need the kittie fresh liter-o-magic model 2, then you will get the specific listings or nothing at all (garbage results as op said)

I would guess that adding fuzzy match to the candidate selection layer would result in better results after ranking with the default “Featured” ranker. Search teams tend to be pretty data-driven and likely have the ability to test whether a change like this improves revenue or some result satisfaction metric.

The problem is compounded by their seeming desire to always claim they have something

I did a search recently for a specific part. "39SF010". (a ~USD1.50-3 flash-ROM chip that is backordered til next year from "legitimate" vendors and from the manufacturer themselves). This is one keyword, and a pretty damn distinctive one. There's little room for there to be a "helpful" algorithm to fix my typing into something better.

With the default results, the first page contained 48 items. Exactly ONE was a relevant product. As a customer, I'd have been perfectly happy to see "results 1-1 of 1" and called it a day. But Amazon clearly didn't want to admit their warehouses are not infinite. There would be some potentially competent fuzzy match options there, but they whiffed it hilariously. Show me some other flash-ROMs, or at least other ICs, programmers, or breadboards, or those starter-kit boxes of no-brand resistors and capacitors... but they instead listed a bunch of toothbrush heads, a box of cookies, three random power bricks, a barbecue grille, flourescent bulbs, and a set of power tools running north of $1500.

Yes.

If you search for "samsung smartphone" and sort from low to high, all you get are covers and screen protectors in the first many pages.

You need to be specific, it’s helpful when you are looking for the cheapest Samsung sh-213 smartphone. Not for browsing categories of items

I find that Amazon is still okay if I already know specifically what I'm trying to order.

But browsing, yeah that shit is a nightmare.

i like going through the black friday and "cyber monday" pages, there's usually about 60 pages of junk. I don't think i've ever bought anything. Interesting to see what amazon wants to get rid of in their warehouses, though.

I still buy from Amazon and almost never had issues. The delivery is max the following day, cheap, lots of variety, etc.

It’s an open to all market, and there are certified channels and customers reviews. Big box stores dream to replicate that.

The customer reviews are hard to tell if they are genuine though.

I still like it, as sometimes you don't really care if you get some cheap knock-off good.

But for important stuff like my monitor, television etc. there's no way I would buy them from Amazon.

> It’s an open to all market, and there are certified channels and customers reviews.

How is it certified if they are commingling inventory?

You must live in a major metro. I live in a medium size town in a rural state, I haven't had two-day prime delivery in years. Typical minimum is about a week

Once you've shopped Alibaba, you recognize that Amazon is basically is just a more expensive interface with a better return policy. just learned that Target stores will price match Amazon at the register. No cumbersome customer service process or anything.

It's not just that, it's that it has to get the details right. Even for "order post-its," it's not clear what color you want, maybe you want extra sticky, or jumbo.

I really want to understand how Amazon doesn’t understand this. What is it that has them so totally blind to what everybody else can so plainly see?

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