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.
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.
And sometimes the filters are completely irrelevant. You’re searching for correction fluid and the filters say 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb-512Gb, 520Mb.
Amazon: the world’s largest enshittification platform!
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.
I’ve custom tailored my Amazon experience using my adblocker to delete pretty much any element that doesn’t serve me.
This includes any and all ads, “recommended” items, “customers also bought…” listings, banners for their business account, and anything that isn’t specifically relevant to the item I’m looking at.
I can’t image using it vanilla. They’d lose my business.
Oh wow, that sounds fantastic. What adblocker is that, and how do you configure it?
I’m using Adguard, but most will have element blocking as a feature.
Basically, I select “block ads on this website”, and I click on the element. A small box comes up where I can fine tune the selected element (I usually do this to get cleaner results), then I preview and confirm the setting.
I’m able to then take that filter, and use it pretty much anywhere else that I use adguard (Android phone, another computer, etc.). It’s awesome.
But like I said, most adblockers will have this feature, including the popular ublock origin. It might just be under a different name.
You can do this for any website :)
Thank you very much indeed, knowledgeable internet stranger.
Yeah I’ve been doing that for years on every site I use frequently (so far that I even got my own YouTube filter list on github). It doesn’t help with broken searches ignoring operators, but it makes the web a much better place nonetheless!
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
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)
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.
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.
I’ve not used Amazon for purchases in around 5 years and my life is no worse.
I’ll often use it to find products and then buy them else where but as this post highlights it’s so annoying seeing the ads all the way and not just organic listing of products.
Where are you buying things that didn’t have ads or sponsored content?
My neighbour
I’m not sure what you mean?
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?”
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)
They do it on purpose. Makes you stay longer, increasing chances of extra sales
So annoying.
Tbh, I find it a little more than mildly infuriating. Verging on very infuriating.
I found what I wanted on ebay, where the same item only appeared more than once if more than one seller was selling it. Amazon repeats the same stuff over and over and over and over.
Ebay sucks though too, they’ll steal your money. I will only use them as a last resort as well. I try to go directly to the manufacturer’s site to get around these big ones.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
