Does anyone else go looking on amazon because they used to have loads of stuff, but now there’s just a few things over and over and over and they’re not quite what you wanted. It’s so full of promoted content and you keep thinking that somewhere on one of the pages there might be something new, but no, it’s these same products again and again.
I found that sometimes I need the right terms to find what I need. I’ll search several times in rapid succession to narrow down what I want.
I wanted an oversized hoodie for my wife that didn’t look like ass and didn’t choke her.
Started with oversized hoodie, oversized woman’s hoodie, oversized hoodie deep neck, finally oversized hoodie v neck was what I wanted. Then I scrolled a few pages to see the options.
It’s really bad though when looking for memory or storage. 1TB nvme? That works. 1TB SSD? Nope. 1TB SSD SATA mostly works, just have to make sure it’s ACTUALLY 1TB.
For computer stuff I just use newegg. The filters are great in most categories and once you find something you can search for that specific product on Amazon to compare prices.
I love trying to search for specific products. “Oh, I see you’re searching for a specific item from a specific name brand. Let me show you everything but that name brand. But first, let me show you stuff that also isn’t that item first. Enjoy.”
can’t say I’ve experienced this exactly but I feel ya in spirit o7
I’ve never used Amazon in my entire life (well, I’ve probably visited websites hosted on AWS, but that’s it).
I see no reason to change that. Besides we have a pretty neat alternative in the Benelux in the form of bol.com. Loads cheaper & more local.
Yeah, amazon used to be cheaper than other places. Now if they are, it’s only by pennies. The enshitification process continues. Hope your Benelux place thrives on good service.
Get the same feelings with Netflix. Like it feels like I’m some experiment for them instead of a customer looking to watch movies.
Actually you may well be part of their “beta experience” which typically sucks ass.
Turn it off in your settings.
Like it kept trying to recommend Carry On after I gave it a thumbs down. That movie was fucking garbage I couldn’t get through the first like 20 minutes
Amazon is deliberately built to be terrible for the users, so they can push products that make them the most money. Most filters are useless, and some don’t work properly, you only have limited sorting options that also don’t work properly (if you sort ascending by price, it will still put sponsored results that don’t respect the sorting order). A while ago, I was looking for a product that I knew should cost about €5, and I couldn’t find any cheaper than €10 until I got to the 10th result page.
For an example of a good search interface, just check farnell.com. It’s insanely good, you can basically filter by any attribute of a product. Being able to use something like this to search for a laptop, or a mobile phone would be amazing.
I clicked through to their browse all products page, and it was a thing of organised beauty.
In the wake of worker strikes and Amazon’s continued enshittification, I have pledged to stop buying anything from them.
That’s a good idea. I should do the same. They’re really annoying anyway.
Check out this screenshot from Home Depot’s website.
About 1/8 of the page is the product. Almost NONE of the page is the “specifications” section, which is the most important section.
The majority of the page is “frequently bought together”, “More from this brand”, and “Customers also viewed”.
I have NEVER bought anything from any of these useless lists. But they have slowed down the page sufficiently that I stopped using their website and went elsewhere. Try browsing with just 10 product pages open on this site – you will start having tabs unload or crash due to memory consumption. Some of these product lists have a dozen items in them if you scroll right, so it consumes gigabytes of RAM.
About 1/8 of the page is the product. Almost NONE of the page is the “specifications” section, which is the most important section.
Not a very useful metric once you add in infinite scroll. More important is the fact is the “frequently bought together” section between the product and its details, all of which are collapsed by default (unless you did that)
I didn’t collapse or uncollapse anything on the page before taking the screenshot. On loading, all the spam sections are uncollapsed, and the “specifications” section is collapsed.
McMaster carr
Honestly that site is genius.
They provide as much information as possible for all their hardware. Specs, drawings, CAD models, similar products, item codes, CAGE codes, everything! All without requiring an account or membership. Why do that when someone could just take that info and use it to find a cheaper source? Especially when they’re more expensive than other sources by 25% or more? Well because engineers will often grab their models and use them in their designs, and when it comes time to order things, knowing the parts ordered will have the exact dimensions and specifications as the ones in your model is often worth the premium. Plus they have so many products that if it’s not on their website, there’s a good chance it doesn’t exist anywhere.
Most other hardware sellers use the worst model imaginable for their sites. The kind where it’s like “Oh, you’d like some tubing? Well give us an email, make an account, and send a message to our sales team to put together a quote for you. And we won’t share the full specs until you do, so there’s no guarantee that we even have what you want.”
McMaster really embraced the philosophy that if you make things as easy as possible for your customers, they’ll choose you even if you’re more expensive.
NONE of the page is the “specifications” section
You may want to double check that. Actually, most of this page could have been left off if that’s all you were looking for.
The “specifications” section is a collapsed section about a quarter of the way down. It starts out collapsed on every page, even if you open it up every time.
Maybe I’m just used to looking up spec sheets but this is pretty standard.
Amazon was never active in my neck of the woods, we had a local competitor. This was a bit shitty for a while, as it didn’t have the same reach Amazon had.
When Amazon finally rented the market it was ok for a while and then enshittification came in.
So we still use the competitor.
Northern Europeans doing it well as usual.
Well the competitor is owned by the largest supermarket chain and they try to follow amazons buns model, so it’s kinda shitty and capitalistic all the same.
But because it’s smaller in scale and doesn’t impact the silly chain that much it’s still mildly better (think Amazon right years ago.
But for the time being it’s slightly better. I think it’s great that Amazon has a competitor that didn’t lose out.
Yeah. Monopoly corporations are awful.
Amazon Canada is just a bunch of no name brand Chinese shit.
the hilarious part is that there is genuinely good Chinese products in 2024 but it’s almost like Amazon wants to flood their store with over priced junk instead
When I look for electronic stuff, that’s exactly what happens. It turns out some of it is good, some of it is awful, but there’s absolutely no way to tell.
Just go to AliExpress, same shit, half the price. Bonus points that while their initial results may not be exactly what you want their recommendation engine usually gets you there quickly enough.
Maybe it’s just my experience, but I have yet to find something on AliExpress for cheaper than somewhere else.
There might be a bit of a knack to it. Anything brand name or bulk generally there aren’t a lot of savings. With the right search terms you can usually uncover third shift items, whether that’s you’re thing or not. Anything you see on Amazon sold by companies with names like HSUUEHE are often 20-40% cheaper. You might need to dig a little, there may be 20-30 listings of the same product from different sellers, some just list things at the same price you’d see them on Amazon. Anything that looks mass produced on Etsy can usually be found as well.
Guess I gotta develop the knack. Thanks for the input!
Haha, tbh it stemmed from a mild fascination with the true range of utter crap and oddly specific items that are available on Ali. Mostly it went the other way (finding stuff on Amazon/Etsy that I’d seen on Ali and being a bit nonplussed with the price on the other platforms).
Edit: derped the image upload
Vs
Interesting. That may be cheaper for you, but once I convert currencies and count shipping, that item costs a little over $1 more from Ali. And then the shipping is likely going to take 1-2 months. For me, it’s cheaper and faster to order that item from Amazon.
Interesting, might be very regional, it’s about a 75% saving for me, choice shipping typically takes about 7-10 days, it’s free if you spend more than £8 (not sure of that’s regional too though)
i first shopped on amazon way back when it was still mostly books. they were just starting to bring in other stuff.
their web site and ui has always been shit.
But also the dont want product you, the your product want dont, and the super dont want you product for (8 pack)
All of which are low on stock.
I boycot Amazon because that company is fucking evil.
I salute you, lord wiggle.
Unless you bought something, then you get the exact item in your ads too. Because hey, we know you liked that book! Why don’t you want another copy of it, uh?
Of course I would want to buy it every week. Who wouldn’t buy the book every week if they liked it so much they bought it once. Buy! Buy! Buy!
Haha, I thought this was a comment on AWS at first. Where everything service is just EC2s and S3 buckets in a trench coat that all do something slightly different than another service they offer.
Which, let’s be clear, is not an inherently bad thing. Most sane people don’t want to reinvent the wheel. If you have a foundation that works and can easily be built off of in a reusable way the. You ultimately end up saving a lot of time and money.
Now, going back to your dig, it is true that Amazon has too many similar services, a lot of which could have just been an offering under an existing service. If you offer a certification just for memorizing what all of your services do then you may have gone too far.
Yeah, I always hated that the foundational cert (or whatever it’s called) is basically just “what service is this”. The worst is that at the rate things change the info doesn’t stay relevant for long.
Sagemaker has literally gone through tens of iterations at this point. Hard to keep straight what it does and doesn’t offer.
I spent a few days ago hunting for a EC2 service that I was being charged for. The AWS budget said it came from “EC2 Services” which yeah, could mean anything.
Started by typing EC2 then clicking every single tab to find what was turned on. I finally found the service because there was a region filter, that let me find out that I was using a EBS that I left activated when I was goofing around in another region.
Yeah, the only thing more confusing than figuring out what service best fits your need is figuring out how it’s billed.
Some services will spin up eight other things and all will look like separate things from a billing perspective, if you aren’t careful with tagging/managing things.
Amazon is just speedy AliExpress. Sellers use all kinds of key words so they pop up in the search, and they’ll use different words for the same drop-shipped item that a dozen other sellers have. The sizes are all different because they’re from varying shops and countries, quality is always questionable, and some are just scams (shout out to that 2tb hardrive I got a few years back that was just coded to read that when plugged in). You can’t trust the reviews, as they’re likely bought, bots, or both.
Looking for a product is low key exhausting, especially if it’s important. You have to check videos, reviews, reddit, lemmy, Twitter, so you can get a variety of responses since the first 5 are alway "wow, my life has been changed by the DooDoo dome 1500.“
