Why do the biggest web stores suck?

Off-topic Chatter
1

Ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress - all suck from the technical point of view.

The ability to filter products, which is the most important thing in a webstore is almost non-existent on all 3.

Product titles are badly chosen on ebay, as well as descriptions and tech specs are bad and/or missing on Ebay and Amazon. They are better on Aliexpress probably because chinese spam all possible keywords in the title, and put a lot of pictures, but their search sucks.
I suspect it sucks on Amazon/ebay as well, but they do a better job in hiding it, so you are not even aware of the relevant products that are not listed.
Shopping cart awful on ebay, and pretty bad on Amazon too, mainly because you cannot select individual products from it.
Ratings completely useless on ebay, slightly useful on Amazon and Aliexpress because a few users are actually legit and post pics.
Categorization bad on ebay, worse on Aliexpress, non existent on Amazon.
Comparisons non-existent on ebay and Aliexpress, and a joke on Amazon.

You would think that companies that are worth hundreds of billion of $ would be able to hire capable programmers, or “engineers” or whatever they like call them.
Even the most basic open source ecommerce platform developed like 10 years ago has more features that these big ass companies provide on their websites.

On the other hand, some small stores do provide good user experience. I have seen a small hardware store with very good filters, categorization and comparisons, that would let you visualise several products from different brands from the category you would be interested at the same time. For example if I wanted to buy a saw blade, I could just filter by diameter, number of teeth, purpose and other properties and they would display a nice grid with all the specs form different brands for comparison. So you would actually end up buying the best suited product with good price-quality ratio

2

First of all - I agree. Online shopping seems more messy than it should be, and I believe there are various reasons for it:

- legacy platforms
Some of the platforms like ebay are more than 20 years old. I am sure they can improve and update, but the core of it is very old. Not every new platform can be integrated into companies from the 90s.

- marketing focus
This whole game we are playing is the largest marketing racket that exists in the world. Marketing teams inside these companies are large, complex, global and very powerful members. The marketing focus a certain department or group within these conglomerates have don’t always line up with the best interest of the consumer.

- legal pricing tactics
The more you pay, the more they get to keep. Even a penny is a lot if 1,000,000 people pay that one penny more. I am not saying they are tricking us into paying more than necessary (they really are), but it is very difficult to find the cheapest and best variant of a product we are looking for. That is by design. If every cheap variant would be shown all the time, their revenues would drop significantly.

- too much data to handle
I don’t believe that they have a handle on their AI systems yet, at least not in a way it makes a commercial benefit for us. The mountain of data around searching, discovery, shopping, baskets, payments and shipments is very, very complex. You need a lot of smart people and excellent solutions to make use of it. It will improve, but we are not there yet.

- big blue chips
All of these companies are very large, with thousands of employees in each BU. I have worked in large companies my entire life and every single change takes an awful amount of time. What we find enticing and possible, may take a full year of politics, string-pulling, and arguments (meetings) to become reality. That is the sad truth.

Or maybe with Brexit, the pandemic and new import tax regulations there could be the rise of something we had before - the local, small mom & pop web store.

3

Too good filter capabilities would mean that the user goes directly to the product they want, rather than browsing hundred of different products from different companies that otherwise would get no exposure.

As any category is only a small fraction of the sales, creating specialized filters for them is too much work.

4

Ok, if filters are too much hassle to implement, what excuse do they have for product descriptions?
I would sort of understand ebay and Ali because they cannot verify every product from every seller, but Amazon does sell products and on those products the Amazon employee who does the data input can write a decent description, and yet they have the worst product descriptions of all 3. Buying is like a lottery if you cannot know the details and specs of the product beforehand. Sure I have the possibility to google the product model/code and find this info on another website… in most cases… but it shouldn’t be like that

5

They probably win more new customers who accidentally stumble upon an item they were not even looking for, than they loose on customers that were looking for a specific item and can’t find it (at all).

The tag’s are ridiculous; everything from an AAA to a 2P4S 21700 is considered to be a tactical light.
If you are looking for a titanium light you’ll find everything that is titanium (colored) except lights.
So I do my own stumbling, and when I see something remotely interesting, I bookmark it for later.

In the meantime I smile when I read the words “beads”or “gears” while I read descriptions where only the context is conclusive about what property (host, led) they mean when they use the word “color”.
Funny thing is that now almost all sellers use the same words so it’s up to the buyer to learn the lingo. Because whether it is (misguided) pride or plain ignorance, the sellers will not adjust their vocabulary.

6

my 2 cents

it is because bad tagging and inaccurate descriptions are in the seller’s interest

A. it is a conflict of interest for them to be sure you do NOT see their listings

so yes a AAA light comes up, when you asked for ‘tactical’

first they do not know what you mean by tactical because you are the expert, they are not
they do not even know they don;t know what that means

second they would not care because see A. above

it is the same reason google gives you a million listings you do not want
so you will see more of their ads

and there is no way (AMAZON, ALIEXPRESS) to tell it “show me tactical flashlights, but not if it has AAA in the description”

tactical AND flashlight AND NOT “AAA”
or
tactical flashlight -AAA

simple
why do they not do that?
see A.

actually ebay does let you do that

7

another search annoyance
(AMAZON ALIEXPRESS)

consider 3 searches

1. titanium
2. light
3. titanium light

1 returns 1000 things
2 returns 2000 things
3 returns 3000 things

is that what i wanted.?
no
i wanted 3 to return less than 1000 things

the things that have both terms
what does it do
it returns items that have either term

NOT USEFUL

reducing search results does not help the retailer

8

Amazon really bugs me. Search for say a camera lens or something very specific.
Show me the darn lens.
Do not show me 4300 stuffed animals and other crap that share a common 3 letter sequence with the lens.
And how hard would it be to actually have the reviews be about the object you want to buy as opposed to three other products that are from the same maker. All mixed together so you have know idea what is being reviewed. As if 80% of the reviews are obviously fake on many items.
And the question section…
“What is the color temperature of this light?”
“Yes dear, the glare is usable in all applications” Whisky Tango Foxtrot??
And I really can’t fault the users who reply with bogus anwsers, but if you have know idea what you are talking about, shut the hell up.
(Although that never seem to have stopped me so far…)

Take a look at https://www.bhphotovideo.com
The biggest photo site in the US. But they have had a physical location that predates the Web my many years.
They sell all sorts of stuff photo and computer related stuff - (some flashlights too).
They manage to have reviews about the actual item, and the search returns meaningful results.
All the Best,
Jeff

9

ha ha to all that

but if they do not show you 4300 teddy bears, you might not buy any teddy bears!!!
same with the fake reviews - no incentive to prevent them

wle

10

You can select individual items in your cart on amazon. If you don’t want an item in your cart, save it for later.

What I don’t like about amazon is you can’t filter words out like you can on ebay. On ebay, you can search for and filter out items with a particular word in the title. An example would be “headlamp –18650 -zoom -zoomable”.

Something else I like about ebay is I can set it to return results from the USA only. This removes all the stuff coming out of china from the results. On amazon, you can filter for their free shipping or prime, but that takes out stuff from independent sellers.

Usually, when searching amazon, I filter manually to all catagories, lowest price, prime and go from there. Filtering by price helps too. Searching in price batches is something I’ve done too with price filtering. The amazon search will return more results than you can actually see so, I filter by price. $10-15, $15-20 and $20-25. Depending on the total results found, the batches can be even smaller. With ebay, you can go from page one to page whatever of the search results.

Thinking about it, I guess I much like ebay’s search over amazon. Both have people listing items just about wherever and there’s lots of products that are just brand changes. Because both are so large, searching can be a challange.

11

The same reason supermarkets will move things around all the time, they want you to see lots of items you aren’t looking for and make impulse purchases. In other words, it’s quite deliberate.

12

I usually love complaining about shit but i think you expect too much.
Been shopping the net for 20 years now so i’ve got my own methods.

Ebay titles? you know they’re done by house moms listing shit for sale. not ebay tech gurus.
Seller feedback can only be given on real completed transactions, how is that useless?

Sort criteria/ Comparison data. easy as fuck on a small store.
A store that sells everything? Category for everything? compared to … everything? sold by…. everyone?
You can provide tools but you cannot force users to use them all the time, this leads to many inconsistencies.

My comparison shopping is always done with multiple stores. Product specs goto the manufacture website, product reviews look to forums.
Once i decide on something all that’s needed is the model # and i can find the best price.

13

Sure, that sort of works when you are already decided on the product lineup because you did your research (somewhere else).
But you cannot do that for everything, you cannot waste so much time becoming an expert in everything.
Sometimes you just want to buy stuff that you need now, and not know much in advance. And with these badly made stores you will end up seeing a very limited offer, or just unclear/missing specs, which will result in ultimately buying something not that good.
Try searching for good flashlights on Amazon and see what result you get.

14

I know exactly what you mean and i’m not sure how any large place can avoid it.
Even if the place had the most amazing sorts,reviews,comparisons, etc, would you still just trust the one website and not look further?
Not order from the website that’s 20% cheaper you found after the amazing website showed you what to buy?
What incentive is there to build this webstore?

I think this is more of a personal preference in how much people want to learn about what they are buying.
How does anyone shop in person at any store anymore? Some people just pick something off the shelf buy it and use it… its crazy :smiley:

You want to buy that saw blade… how much did you learn about the saw your using? the art of wood working? research for materials?

15

Yeh. I needed a small-diameter drain-snake. Goggled around on Amazon, useless. Plush snakes and drain-plugs, but not much of any use. Some big honkin’ drain-snakes thrown in, but not enough to be useful.

Went to Home Despot’s site, found one that was exactly what I needed. Not in stock. Only option was ship-to-store and at least a week out.

Hmmmm.

Grabbed the mfr and model number of the snake from HD, and plugged that into Amazon. Got it! Same price within a dime or so, ready to ship, got it delivered to my doorstep within a week, vs having to wait a week and then have to trek on over a few miles there’n’back, via all local streets, to pick it up.

There’s always a bunch of black magic involved in finding needles in online haystacks.

16

Same. Don’t forget youtube. More than likely, someone’s made a video about it. The reviews and Q&As on amazon and home depot can sometimes help too.

17

Yes, was trying to keep it brief. Many sources to check.

The answer to thread title is another question: how can they not suck? endless criteria, endless variety of products and sellers.

One thought: Force every online seller to use 1 website, how else is it even possible?
Likelyhood of anyone going for that on a global scale? lol

Lets just start with all manufactures providing full specs, product details etc… that doesn’t even happen yet

18

because they are big.

19

That may be true, but amazon deliberately made theirs worse a few years ago, they replaced the “most popular” sort option with a “featured” option, that seems generally useless, and puts their own and sponsored products first.

20

And they used to have feedback for everything like “how was this packaged?” to “how were your search-results?”. I remember both, but haven’t seen either in recent or even not-so-recent memory.