211–220 of 222 posts
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As a non-American this seems like a ridiculously complicated tax system.
Honestly, this is the first instance I've ever heard of anyone going to the lengths of recalling their purchase history to backpay sales tax. If it makes one feel better to do it, by all means do it. Among the list of egregious tax offenses that exist, this is likely pretty low on the IRS list to audit people.
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IME product details given in eBay listings refer to that product from that seller, rather than a similar product from anyone of a number of current or past sellers (as Amazon appears to). Thus ratings are useful, as are reviews.
User rating does refer to the individual, yes, but product rating is across all examples of that product. I've been asked by eBay to rate products I've purchased, and it even says in the guidelines "rate the product, not the seller". Product description should be specific to the one being sold.
I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy Yorkshire Gold tea on Amazon (I am in the US). I encountered so many bad reviews of users complaining about the quality, and the flavor being weakened, or not the authentic YG flavor, that I gave up. It was impossible to tell to which seller each bad review was attributable. I went on Ebay, found decent UK sellers in less than 5 minutes, and ordered my tea. Downsi…
There are certain swaths of items that you literally can't buy anymore because they are completely overrun with counterfeiters. Perfume/cologne and board games are two big ones. Amazon is, at this point, undoubtedly one of the largest enablers of open counterfeiting in the world. It needs to be met with a massive investigation and crippling fines. That probably won't happen until we have a federal government that is…
I've heard that phone chargers almost always are fake, and perfume doesn't surprise me. I'd assume brand-name clothing is suspect. Would not have guessed board games, the market doesn't strike me as big enough to be worth it (though I'm not into board games so I could be wrong).
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I find it interesting that we think of Amazon as having gotten "customer service" right. I've had two classes of experience with Amazon: Products they act as a seller for, and products they act as a producer for. When I'm buying item X and it's not up to par, Amazon's response is invariably "just send it on back and we'll refund you." At one point I complained I'm not taking a half-day off work to get this $5 item in…
I can see that 3 hour call being real - I’ve had similar experiences with amazon customer service that I could foresee becoming a long call, such as canceling Prime: they certainly made me wait about 15-20 minutes while trying to “procure permission” and it ended up being some kind of verbal guarantee that another depr would email me the confirmation. After a few hours I did get the confirmation and refund. The entir…
I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy Yorkshire Gold tea on Amazon (I am in the US). I encountered so many bad reviews of users complaining about the quality, and the flavor being weakened, or not the authentic YG flavor, that I gave up. It was impossible to tell to which seller each bad review was attributable. I went on Ebay, found decent UK sellers in less than 5 minutes, and ordered my tea. Downsi…
This is one of the products which I have ordered frequently and with which I didn't expect any problems. Almost all the reviews are good, the price is good and I've been subscribing and saving for years. So I'm genuinely curious why you thought Amazon wasn't good for this item. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000XEV9YE
I've never had it, i'm not a tea expert, and this doesn't definitively say its different, but it would certainly make me pause.. Granted, in this case it doesn't seem to be an amazon issue as much an issue of the manufacturer, different recipes for different regions, etc.
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On the other side, a $15 chisel set is essentially fungible as well.
Counterintuitively, the $15 price point is probably the point at which they are least fungible. Consider a 1/2" chisel: $5 chisels are universally crap (terrible steel, terrible finish) $35 or thereabouts chisels (Stanley 750, Two Cherries) are almost universally fine (modulo weird personal preferences that some people have?). Companies manufacturing chisels at this price point tend to do a lot of QC or have their pr…
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The startup I work for, Masse[0], is attempting to solve this issue. More or less a platform for product reviews with a social network component to see exactly who is recommending a product. I've written a little about it here [1][2]. [0] https://masse.app/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18441347 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/9wpw84/introducing_...
> Product recommendations from people you trust Why do I trust user reviews on your site more than user reviews on any other site? Or is this assuming that my some of friends have already become users and we will only look at each others' reviews? It would be nice if you could "glue" together one's reviews across all third party sites.
You're more likely to trust user reviews on this site because the reviews are likely to be coming from people who you are connected to in some way.
We haven't been around too long (launched mid-November, have a team of 7: 1 iOS, 2 backend eningeers, and product/marketing/community folks, plus a few contractors), but we'll be rolling out more features to help evaluate the trustworthiness of the reviews that users see.
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The startup I work for, Masse[0], is attempting to solve this issue. More or less a platform for product reviews with a social network component to see exactly who is recommending a product. I've written a little about it here [1][2]. [0] https://masse.app/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18441347 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/9wpw84/introducing_...
I was intrigued, but after visiting your website I'm ambivalent. The only way to truly combat shilling is to fully embrace a model where each person sees reviews only from their own personal network of sources— this drastically reduces the "eyeball multiplier" that makes mass media so attractive to marketers. But seeing things like "Top 3 Recommended" on your website makes me believe you're falling into the same trap…
Re: product identification...actually people tend to shop from the same places (think of the product coverage of the top 5000 retailers). We don't have those top 5000 yet, but we're working on it. We get most of our product data from affiliate networks, who offer up that data to drive sales back to their site. For whatever we can't import and internalize, we have a "search anything" feature which allows the user to use a web view to navigate to a product page and import the product.
You're right, resolving duplicates and variants is a very tricky problem that can become incredibly complicated. Right now we use some very basic heuristics like normalized name and brand, ASIN, GTIN, EAN, UPC, etc. But actually, we don't need things to be perfect. So long as a user can get to a product that is more or less what they want to recommend, they're happy. Also, when you are searching for a product to recommend (this is not "browsing," it's when you are trying to answer a recommendation with a specific product) we boost products that have already been recommended. This way we can get users who are looking for a particular product to recommend the same instance of that product. We also focus our efforts on cleaning up the data for products that have already been recommended, which is a much smaller subset than our total catalog.
Our data is stored in Neo4j, we find its structure to be well suited to a product catalog and taxonomy, and it allows us to derive relationships between products. The process of improving our catalog is an ongoing task, and one that will likely never end.
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> Product recommendations from people you trust Why do I trust user reviews on your site more than user reviews on any other site? Or is this assuming that my some of friends have already become users and we will only look at each others' reviews? It would be nice if you could "glue" together one's reviews across all third party sites.
Yes, your "feed" is populated with answers and questions about products from the people you follow. We give a few people who you can opt to follow when onboarding. Because you can see other users who answered a question asked by someone you follow, and see the question answered by someone you follow, you can be exposed to new users (who you can then follow). You're more likely to trust user reviews on this site becau…
One concern is that I don't generally buy products starting with Q&A from people I follow. My process is more like: research products that solve problem X, then look at trusted reviews for X. It just seems like the intersection of reviews from people I follow and products that I want to buy would be extremely sparse (i.e., most of the time there wouldn't be a matching review).
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A lot of people like to disparage Best Buy but I’ve found the stores in my area to be excellent and the staff to always be friendly and helpful. They’ll also price match Amazon in most cases. Their PC components selection isn’t huge, but for things like consoles, games, peripherals, etc., I feel like they’re great. They also offer one-hour pickup and in some cases will even give you a discount if you choose that over…
For a lot of stuff, I agree. For certain things, though, Best Buy is a complete ripoff. I once went to get an HDMI cable and all that had was a $100 gold plated one. I walked up to the guy in that department and told him I knew this was a scam and he agreed. I told him I'd not buy anything from them and wait the 2 days to get a $5 one from Amazon. Best Buy isn't doing themselves any favors by this behavior. There's a…