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 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.“
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
The niche thing you just bought just two months ago and that no one would ever need two of in their life.
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 mean I bought one toilet seat, clearly I need 16 more, they know us so well
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?
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.
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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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?”
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.
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.
Also you have automatically been signed up and charged for Prime.
- So hard to avoid signing up for Prime.
- Even harder to cancel your free trial of Prime if you ever caved and took the free trial.
- I don’t know why they don’t do Prime for free all year. I always buy more when I’m on free trial Prime. It would be an easy way to get more of my cash. But I guess enshittifying executives are going to demand more customer charges, and maybe they get more money from paid Prime subscribers than they get from increased purchasing anyway.
It’s not just a matter of avoiding it, I have been signed up for prime on days I didn’t eve use Amazon. The system will sign you up on its own.
Amazon search was never good, but it was not a problem before it got flooded with cheap Chinese crap.
The cheap Chinese crap makes Amazon worse, which results in loss of customers, which frightens the Shareholders (line has to go up), to increase the profit the management milks their cash cow (AKA cheap Chinese crap sellers) so more Chinese crap is in the site. The circle of life.
Yesterday was some houseware. There wasn’t anything Chinese in the listing, but it was the same sponsored wrong products again and again and again and again and again and again. I get more Chinese stuff when I look for electrical items, but sometimes the Chinese stuff works out for me.
If you make the same search for houseware on AliExpress I bet you’ll find most of what you saw on Amazon
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.
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.
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.
