[ekarulf]

It's a hard problem to determine the repeat purchase cadence of a product. At one end of the bell curve you have items re-purchased frequently, e.g. diapers or grocery, and on the other end you have items that are rarely repurchased.

I haven't looked at coffee tables specifically, but I know when I've looked at home products in the past I've been surprised at how frequently people will buy two large items, e.g. TVs or furniture, within a short period. That said, I agree there is room for improvement here. We're constantly running experiments to improve the customer experience, I have faith that in the limit things will improve. Again, we have no shortage of experimental power so if you'd like to join in the experimentation let me know :)

[cheeze]

IMO it comes down to the fact that Amazon literally has my last 13 years of purchasing history, yet it seems that all they are doing is "you looked at x, lets show you y variations of that x."

My dream is that I go to Amazon.com and there are a ton of different unrelated products that people who purchase similar things as me buy. So if I only buy "buy it for life" kitchen equipment, it doesn't show me the most popular but crappy version of something, it shows me the one that I'd actually purchase.

Such an easy problem with suuuuuch a difficult solution though. Not to mention the obvious privacy concerns there.

Oh well, I know that they have good people working on the solution, and no chance I could do it better :p

[UweSchmidt]

This answer doesn't quite satisfy :-)

This topic must be extremely interesting (good suggestions could increase sales by a LOT) and smart people must have been working on it for quite a while.

- What is the fundamental reason why this is a hard problem?

- What's up with the coffee tables specifically, could you, for the hell of it, look into that category and tell us what the actual related products are? Let us (fail to) guess how these products are related, but don't let us hanging :-)

[nimchimpsky]

"It's a hard problem to determine the repeat purchase cadence of a product."

I don't think it is.

[gberger]

Do you work at Amazon, or do you have experience in this area? Care to elaborate?

[iwintermute]

Do you have any obfuscated training sets available to public?

edit:typo