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.
Amazon: You want to search for laptops with Graphics cards? Want to filter by RTX 3000s, 2000s, or 1600s?
Me: What about RTX 4000s?
Amazon: “What is a RTX 4000?”
Yeah it’s pretty trash, and I’ve found that if I buy direct from the manufacturer website for 99% of stuff I’ll actually save $5-10, including shipping
I use google. All it does is shove products at you anymore, so you might as well take advantage of that and use the search function that works far better than Amazon’s. All the Amazon sold products will show up in the google search anyway. Unfortunately, google’s modifiers are essentially worthless (like if you put -“amazon.com” or whatever to avoid amazon items) so it’s pretty hard to filter stuff, but at least Google casts a wider net so you might find better products or deals. Amazon does not always have the better price.
If you see a particular item in the google search that is what you’re looking for you can plug that specific brand and item name in amazon’s search and see if they even carry it. Sometimes they don’t, but that will help skip past Amazon’s shitty algorithm that forces items they want you to buy like made-for-Amazon crap vs what might actually be a better product.
Order it right from the widget maker directly if you can and skip amazon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Member when Bezos wanted to solve product reviews to make their search work better? Some time ago, Amazon just gave up and surrendered to the hellscape it has become.
Someone wrote the code that puts the same listing four times per page.
we need anti-enshitification extensions and apps for amazon and ebay, the former is even worse
It might just be the things I go on ebay for but they’ve really cleaned up their site in the past ~10 years. I remember when searching for literally anything would give you results like OP’s pic but I haven’t seen that in years. I think i do like 80% of my online shopping there nowadays
Today I gave up on amazon and found the item I wanted on ebay, which was much easier to browse because it showed me each product from each seller roughly once. It was so much easier. I saw the same stuff as I saw on amazon but about 80 other products too. Amazon used to be the ones with the product range, and that’s how they got big. Now they’ve enshitified quite thoroughly.
the former is even worse
Amazon is worse than Amazon?
The niche thing you just bought just two months ago and that no one would ever need two of in their life.
I mean I bought one toilet seat, clearly I need 16 more, they know us so well
That one drives me up the wall. It happened to me recently, but on something a bit more mainstream - a spanner set. No, I don’t need another spanner set! Seriously, who buys more than one spanner set ever? Oh, and sometimes I search for an item, don’t buy it, but then I’m offered great deals on similar products every time I log in for the rest of time.
I looked at ONE light switch because I couldn’t find exactly the type in other stores (single-gang dual 2-way multipole) and now they will NOT stop emailing me about electrical equipment and supplies as if i was a contractor
Exactly. Amazon are the pushiest of the dodgy pushy salesperson.
My weirdest Amazon experience was when I went to Lowe’s and bought a drill bit and a pair of cabinet door hinges, and just looked at cabinet pulls for a minute or two - didn’t buy any or even pick any up. That night, Amazon recommended for me drill bits, cabinet door hinges … and cabinet pulls. I’m assuming that I got linked to in-store footage from Lowe’s, which is creepy but certainly not suprising.
Is Lowe’s like a physical amazon store?
They’re not in any way associated with Amazon, as far as I know. But apparently they sell their customer data to them - and immediately.
That is pretty scummy.
Your phone’s Wi-Fi told them exactly where in the store you were. That’s how they knew what you were looking at.
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.”
I abandoned Newegg because of all the negative comments about not being able to return stuff.
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.
God forbid you want to use search exclusion.
Oh, you searched for “some item -plastic”, guess that means you want all these bestselling plastic ones.
I have literally used their own filter system to find something with very specific specs and it still shows me totally unrelated bullshit because just like SEO, people will just put an entire fucking dictionary in the description or tags so it always shows up no matter what you’re searching for.
Amazon: the world’s largest enshittification platform!
And sometimes the filters are completely irrelevant. You’re searching for correction fluid and the filters say 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb-512Gb, 520Mb.
Your first mistake is giving Amazon money.
Very true. Jeff Bezos already has enough. And, like most countries, Amazon doesn’t pay tax in my country through the typical shady tax dodges multinational corporations pull.
The product you actually want:
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Out of Stock -
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Doesn’t qualify for Prime Shipping -
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Doesn’t have the best Shipping/Price options -
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Unavailable -
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“We do not know when this item will be restocked!” -
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I boycot Amazon because that company is fucking evil.
I salute you, lord wiggle.
What annoys me about Amazon search is it doesn’t listen to my search, and it doesn’t allow qualifiers such as minus sign. Most other searches listen to minus sign as excluding that word from search.
Example: metal cup -plastic -mug -jug
I search for a metal cup, but I do not want plastic, and not a mug or jug.
Yeah, their plan is: deduce what kind of thing they want, broaden it to include more sponsored products, list as many as possible to boost ad revenue, try as hard as possible to get them to cave and buy a sponsored product so we can make more money from ad revenue. Sucks as a customer. Probably sucks as a supplier, it’s the standard monopoly enshitified money extraction maximiser.
