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Comment by geodel | Hacker News Reader

> By comparison, the typical consumer shopping experience is much more one of discovery, not need-solution mnatching.

Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.

> Keep in mind the average HN user is not the typical shopper. You and I might like to "get in and get out" but so many consumer shoppers ...

Yes I love to stores and see various items that I wouldn't typically buy. I could even go to, say Costco website to see random "newly arrived seasonal items".

But on shopping websites when searching for products most people are not looking to enjoy "incredible joys of discovery" by being forced to scroll through search results for things which they haven't even searched for.

Its purely ads and "marketplace" bullshitery from Amazon and others.

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> Even if I put full fucking detail with brand and model I keep getting pages and pages of random products with different "sponsored" brands, model, features and so on. Its clearly need of Amazon are taking priority over mine.

When inside of a real brick and mortar store, have you walked by one of those displays on the ends of a row that's selling Pepsi products or Doritos? How do you think those things got there? They're called end caps, and stores make a lot of money from brands to put them there because customers are more likely to see them and purchase whatever.

Also, have you noticed that the shelves at stores usually contain the most well known brands at eye level while the cheap stuff or weird stuff is usually down low or up high? That may be store optimization, but more commonly those top brands pay for that eye-level placement.

Amazon didn't invent this. They just came up with the digital equivalent of what stores have been doing for decades.

I can ignore displays and go to right aisle to choose on products. On Amazon there is no equivalent. If they just ignore my search request I am stuck with trawling through irrelevant results.

Amazon search may have lots of results that I don't care about, but is generally accurate on the first try.

The brick and mortar experience is ostensibly 10x worse than being able to use a search box. Grocery stores and Home improvement stores are the worst - I probably spend 80% of my time there trying find where things are, with the overhead labels generally being useless.

Yes, of course end caps are doing the same thing, prioritizing the store's needs over the shopper's. They pull the same shit with how they lay out the store, to make you spend more time in it and travel over more of it. Which turns out to mean they're not just prioritizing profit over what's personally best for their shoppers, but also over public health, when there's serious infectious disease on the loose—which is all the time, and especially every Winter, but we got a particularly memorable lesson in the cost of that sort of thing, rather recently.

As serious as infectious disease is, I'm not even sure it's the biggest impact: the venn diagram of endcap products and products likely to contribute to metabolic syndromes is probably pretty close to a circle.

At least the pandemic moved a lot of shopping online and gave a margin of convenience back to customers.

Yeah, good point.

Now I'm wondering whether all this customer-hostile activity on the part of grocery stores actually ends up being net negative for the economy. It may be a negative-sum action they're taking, in purely easy-to-quantify economic terms, without even putting a value on wasting shoppers' time or whatever extra stress or irritation that causes. A few extra flu cases per week per store can cause a lot of harm in lost productivity and medical bills, and then, as you point out, there's the way they push junk food.

I find when amazon doesn't show what I want when I get specific, it's because they don't really sell it. When they do, it matches pretty close or 1:1 fairly quickly. Also notice they're not good about items that have a lot of customization, like macbooks that a very specific config or something like shoes that let you chose 6 different color combos for various parts. For those speciality things I find you just need to go to the brand store which creates custom software for it. Maybe your looking for things they don't sell or is pretty customizable?

I was (and still am) frustrated with Amazon's practice of showing me what _they_ think I want, instead of what I searched for. It violates a basic tenet of the server-client relationship, serve what the client asked for.

I was happy to discover that AliExpress didn't do these shenanigans. You search for an item, it shows matches. Wonderful — and then they changed it, so now halfway through your results, you'll see completely unrelated items.

So now it's just a garbage web filled with garbage results.

Exactly right. And considering how many here do appreciate Amazon's position here, to me, it just shows Amazon/ e-commerce web sites have conditioned tons of users to find terrible user experience agreeable.

I have made the opposite experience. I enjoy the search results Amazon provides, but find it incredibly difficult to find the right product on AliExpress. How do you navigate the seemingly auto-translated jungle of similar products on AliExpress?

A critical component of being able to change high rates for sponsorship is to not show people precisely what they’re looking for. Also, once people find what they’re looking for they stop looking which reduces ad impressions.

Amazon are just in the exploit stage of the build-exploit cycle and are making so much money doing it I doubt they’ll stop.

True. Founder CEO is out. Incoming one just has to keep growing ad business and leave Amazon with probably billion dollar retirement/severance package. After all it wouldn't be unheard of in 1-2 decades.

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