If there's one thing Amazon could use improvement on, is it's search results. Specifically, sorting them.
Seriously, I just tried it now. My complaints:
- Why do I have to pick a department to sort? (I can kind of understand this, but it's annoying)
- Why isn't shipping taken into account when I sort?
- Why are used and new prices mixed when sorting?
While I understand that Amazon can't read my mind, there are certain product categories (cell phone cases, for example) where it's like panning for gold. You need to spend a non-trivial amount of time digging for a quality case for a good price.
I don't have a solution, but it certainly feels harder than it needs to be. Searching on newegg.com feels so much better, but I suppose they have the advantage of having a very narrow focus.
Also, sorting by reviews is broken (in the sense of being useful). A product with a single rating of 5 stars should not be ranked above a product with 1000 five-star ratings and 1 four-star rating. It's a really easy problem to solve too...
Agree completely re: Newegg, and yet their lack of Prime and CA sales tax mean I never ever ever shop there anymore. The tax thing makes it a really unfair playing field and should be fixed.
Comments
If there's one thing Amazon could use improvement on, is it's search results. Specifically, sorting them.
Seriously, I just tried it now. My complaints:
- Why do I have to pick a department to sort? (I can kind of understand this, but it's annoying)
- Why isn't shipping taken into account when I sort?
- Why are used and new prices mixed when sorting?
While I understand that Amazon can't read my mind, there are certain product categories (cell phone cases, for example) where it's like panning for gold. You need to spend a non-trivial amount of time digging for a quality case for a good price.
I don't have a solution, but it certainly feels harder than it needs to be. Searching on newegg.com feels so much better, but I suppose they have the advantage of having a very narrow focus.
Also, sorting by reviews is broken (in the sense of being useful). A product with a single rating of 5 stars should not be ranked above a product with 1000 five-star ratings and 1 four-star rating. It's a really easy problem to solve too...
The silly thing is that IMDB figured out ranking in 1997 by using a beysian posterior mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database#Ranking...
(guess who has owned IMDB for over 10 years?)
Agree completely re: Newegg, and yet their lack of Prime and CA sales tax mean I never ever ever shop there anymore. The tax thing makes it a really unfair playing field and should be fixed.
ShopRunner (http://www.shoprunner.com/). It's basically Prime for Newegg and a bunch of other stores.
Unfortunately the tax problem still stands.