And if not… WHY HAS NO ONE MADE IT YET???
For shopping? Amazon makes money on both ends, from the buyers and the sellers. The sellers pay to put their stuff in premier locations in the search results (and it’s not always first). The janky ass search function is a profitable feature for Amazon that let’s them obscure what you’re really looking for in the hopes that you’ll give up and buy the thing in front of you.
If Amazon was a grocery store, and you went to buy eggs, you might look up at the signs on the wall to find eggs, and walk towards that spot. But what if the store knew where you were heading, and placed other stuff in your way. How about some egg substitutes that you have to climb over? And here are organic duck eggs that are more expensive but get great reviews. Also, did you need butter? People who buy eggs also buy butter. No? Ok, here’s the display with regular chicken eggs. These are $4 a dozen, and over here we have these at $4.25 a dozen, and those are $6 a dozen, and they all have exactly the same packaging. Did you need them this week or can you wait until these ship next month? The $6 eggs have great reviews, and did you need butter? You picked the $4.25 eggs which should arrive in a few days. Pay no attention to the dozen eggs that were $3.25 and shipped free.
Why has nobody made a better search option? Because Amazon doesn’t want it to exist.
You’re right, but grocery stores sell their shelf space, too, down to the inch and not just the end caps. So this is exactly what’s happening in your grocery store, only online I think the annoyance comes from the slim chance you can get around it if you try hard enough and the lack of instinct when dealing with pictures and text instead of real objects.
To add to your metaphor. The grocery store has also collected enough data on you to know exactly how much you’d be willing to pay for eggs versus how much your neighbor would be willing to pay for eggs. So they show you and your neighbor two different egg prices when you get to the cooler.
A) Don’t use fucking Amazon.
B) It would require a third party to scrape Amazon’s entire search catalog, which Amazon would almost certainly block.
How do those plugins that track the prices of amazon listings over tome get their data? Don’t they scrape it from the site?
I’m not a plugin developer, so this is just a guess; but I think they scrape from specific items, not the entirety of Amazon’s database.
Via users viewing them with the plugin installed.
You have to know what you specifically want coming in. You can’t rely on Amazon’s crap search.
Can you imagine if every site had as powerful of search capabilities as what ebay offers?
I’ve heard if you just type in “choking hazard” on Temu, their entire inventory shows up.
That’s true. The ebay search is S tier for sure.
I have been finding myself buying more stuff at B&H (computer parts) and Home Depot’s (home supply) websites when I can. Not only are Amazon’s results bad, they actively chase away good products, leaving you with brands that facerolled the keyboard when picking their name that won’t be around in a year.
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There is incentive to make you view many pages and see items. I imagine that is the highest priority.
With structured item data and putting things in correct categories (and the marketplace actually enforcing products follow this system), searching could be much better. However, it’s cheaper to not do that and, combined with my above educated guess, we are where we are now.
I try to use websites with better, more-detailed search for this reason.
No.
But if you have to buy from Amazon (and sometimes it is difficult to avoid), find it via a search on your less evil search engine of choice so that Amazon has to pay them for the click.
Tons and cheaper alternatives to Amazon, if one can invest a bit of time in looking around for stuff.
What are a few? Any good lists?
Where do you live? What do you use Amazon for? For instance, I live in Spain and when I shop for electronics I check local sites, such as pccomponentes, electroprecio, wipoid, mediamarkt, fnac, el corte inglés and a bunch of others. Also aliexpress or ebay, if I need relatively cheap stuff.
Depending on product type and region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_shopping_website#Major_websites
