Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#2That was bothering me for ages. I wish someone from Amazon came out to explain what' really going on with broken sort.
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#3This is one of the few annoyances of shopping at Amazon. As a Prime user, I usually don't want to deal with anyone other than Amazon directly.
There's a search filter option to select "Prime eligible" items, but when you select it, the price sorting still seems to include Marketplace vendors. Selecting the "New" search filter does not help.
There's even a search filter for "Seller" that allows you to select only amazon.com, but the price sort is still wrong if this is selected!
(I understand that Amazon probably prefers that we stumble upon the marketplace vendors, but it's frustrating when you can't disable it even temporarily.)
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#4That was bothering me for ages. I wish someone from Amazon came out to explain what' really going on with broken sort.
I never really use sort by price because I find that the cheapest results are usually not very relevant, but I do have other complaints about sorting results on Amazon...
Why do I still need to select a department in order to sort? Does Amazon really not have the resources to index their entire product database (or at the very least just pick the department with the most results to save me a click)? And why can I only sporadically sort by bestselling/most popular?
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#5They probably found that it increased sales by 0.7%.
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#6They probably found that it increased sales by 0.7%.
They found that quasi-random ordering increased sales? That seems odd. What algorithm do you suppose they're using to order results? Random number generator?
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#7That was bothering me for ages. I wish someone from Amazon came out to explain what' really going on with broken sort.
I never really use sort by price because I find that the cheapest results are usually not very relevant, but I do have other complaints about sorting results on Amazon... Why do I still need to select a department in order to sort? Does Amazon really not have the resources to index their entire product database (or at the very least just pick the department with the most results to save me a click)? And why can I onl…
I never really use sort by price because I find that the cheapest results are usually not very relevant
That's exactly part of the problem. If I'm searching for something specific like 'iPod Touch 32GB' I should not get results for $0.99 iPod cables and cases.
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#8Good question. Amazon is great for searching, pretty good for browsing, but pretty awful for browse-searching, where you're trying to narrow down results via search but still browse through them using various sorting and filtering types. The consistently awful price handling is the worst part of it.
I often find myself doing product filtering on other sites (yes, I feel a bit bad about this) and then (usually) buying on Amazon because of price and the free Prime shipping.
eg. I'll figure out what I want to buy for a new computer system on Newegg, because their combined browse-search is way better than Amazon's, and then take the final result and see if it is worth buying on Amazon via a direct parts name/number search. Amazon loses about 10-20% of the sales I would have otherwise just given them due to this when it turns out the cost to buy the item on the other site I was using is similar enough to the Amazon price. When the price is even close I favor the other site since they provided me a better UX experience, but I do admit that if the overall cost to buy on Amazon is significantly cheaper, I'll still buy from them.
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#9I don't work at Amazon but worked at one of the largest comparison shopping sites in a core search group.
Sorting by price is hard - if you really wanted to do a true price sort you end up with the long tail of products that match the term "ipod" (but are very loosely related to ipods) at the top of search results. Try searching for ipod in electronics and sorting by price.:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3Aipod%2C...
I get a usb connector, stereo speaker, some other mp3 players, etc. all among the top 6 results. Only 2 ipods on the first page. At least there is a link to a department containing just the ipods.
So in order to avoid doing really badly you don't allow searching by pure price, but rather use a combination of price and relevancy (and this can only take you so far as the results above demonstrate.)
Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?
#10It's only bad because they are lazy greedy slobs.
It's the easiest problem to solve. Just remove bad categorization.
Open Amazon, click any category. Let's say hdmi cables. What do you see? Probably televisions, screws, microwave ovens, inflatable sex dolls, anything!
They let bad Sellers fill their categories with crap. Now you can't search.
And that's some kind of difficult problem to solve? Give me a break.