[otisfunkmeyer]

Not to derail this comment section too much but your comment made me realize how much I too find Amazon's search to be terrible terrible.

It's especially strange considering that Bezos has such an almost pathological (not necessarily in the bad sense) focus on the customer.

One would think Amazon would have some of the best, most laser-focused search of any site on the Internet, but I can't even reliably use 4-stars-and-up as a search filter, or even "Prime only." No matter what I do, I get shown things outside of the filter I set up. It's downright bizarre.

Again, my apologies for the little thread hijacking. I guess one could at least argue it's "search-related" lol....

[dingaling]

Amazon's request that I 'Choose a department to enable sorting' of search results is an abomination.

How am I meant to know how they have categorised something? Should I look in Cameras & Electronics for an SD card or Memory? Or one of the other 24 Departments they suggest?

How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years?

[dragonwriter]

> How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years?

Maybe because they are dominating internet retailing so much that they don't feel any need to, largely through low prices achieved through (1) narrow margins, and (2) not doing anything that isn't aimed at reducing long term costs per sale.

You think it sucks, I think it sucks -- but if empirically its working good enough and fixing it is a cost without a clear payoff for them, why do it?

[ma2rten]

Less friction always leads to better conversion. Amazon knows that, that is why they have one click orders.

Improving their search would mean that more people find what they want to buy. That means more sales, PERIOD.

[dragonwriter]

> Improving their search would mean that more people find what they want to buy.

Sure, improving their search would mean that more people find what they were initially planning to buy without seeing as much other stuff. Of course, offline retail experience has been that that's generally a good thing for premium venues, its usually exactly the exact opposite of what is good for sales in discount venues.

And, even to the extent that it might be a net gain -- I suspect it would, overall -- its quite easy to believe it might not (despite 20 years) have ever reached the level of being the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of benefit/cost ratio.

[DanBC]

See also Ebay, where sorting SD cards by price gives you people selling you an adapter for 0.99 or a card for 8.99, which pushes that listing into the 0.99 end of the list.

(Yes, I am aware that searching ebay for the cheapest sd cards is foolish!)

[GavinB]

It's possible that Amazon's analytics demonstrate that you're more likely to purchase if shown a wider variety of products, even if you attempted to narrow it down.

Not that their short term bottom line is a worthy excuse for deceptive and confusing search practices.