alt Hacker NewsIt’s not just clothes. Unless the item is a very specific name brand thing, I find Amazon nearly useless for discovery. It’s effectively Ali Express with much higher markup and much faster shipping. I suppose there’s a market for that.
Unfortunately for them, I’d rather buy cheep Chinese crap from a local retailer where there is still a human buyer in the loop choosing something that’s not the lowest bottom of the barrel junk.
When I worked there a long time ago I spoke to the search team about moving more towards a New Egg style filtering model. When I’m looking for something there’s often very specific features I want. Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want. I’ve bought more than a few wrong things due to this. Returns must not factor into whatever fees they’re making off everything else.
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> Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want.
Not exactly, they'll show you the items they want you to buy/are paid to promote. They don't actually think you want the crap their search surfaces, at most they think they can con you into buying that stuff anyway as long as they make it difficult or impossible for you to find what you're actually looking for.
I guess for things like clothes or generic homegoods, I've seen this deluge of random China goods. But shopping for other things, like electronics, it does a really good job of surfacing what I'm actually looking for, whether that be name brand or generic.
If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.