What's the most painful thing about online shopping?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34476437

by sagarmaruthi • 4 years ago

5 9 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Companies like Amazon have made online shopping simple and accessible, but I believe that online shopping is still broken. Finding a product is still a manual process where you browse through products on different websites. Search on e-commerce websites just doesn't work. We still browse through category lists while finding our products, like we used to do 20 years back.

golol• 4 years ago

I believe Shopping search will be revolutionized with language models just like general search

RobotToaster• 4 years ago

Amazon deliberately broke their search several times, one used to be able to simply sort searches or categories by the most popular, but that got replaced by "featured" several years ago.

Lately it's at least half "sponsored" results.

kris_wayton• 4 years ago

Obviously faked reviews is my pet peeve. It's irritating that Amazon can't figure out how to spot and remove these, or at least offer a "report this" button. Even when the review is obviously for an entirely different product.

gr4yb34rd• 4 years ago

search has always been a peeve of mine, too. then i had to work on a self-hosted magento project and saw how resource expensive search is compared to everything else.

so tired of hearing about amazon, though. it's like we've got a new demographic of people who are incapable of going to best buy or target without turning it into some "fight the power" internet activism.

pwg• 4 years ago

What's the most painful thing about online shopping?

1) broken search (as in returns everything except the thing I am looking for);

1a) search that does not index model/product numbers -- if I have obtained a model/product number from somewhere (say a review), I want that exact item to come up via a search on that model/product number;

2) sites that hide shipping and handling charges until after they want my credit card info (for me, this is an immediate abandoned cart);

3) sites that don't provide any sizing/measurements, or just as bad, provide "dimensionless" numbers (i.e.: Measurements: 12" x 6" x 3" -- is that length, width, height, or width, length, height, or height, width, length?). Sometimes one can workout which is likely which, but sometimes, esp. for near cubic items, it is impossible to reason out which is which. Special points to the few sites that not only label the measurements (12" L x 6" W) but also provide an image diagram of what they consider length vs width vs height.

DerekBickerton• 4 years ago

The most painful thing I've encountered is having to register on multiple different e-commerce stores and fill in all my personal info again. Most consumers don't want an account, and most merchants allow you to buy without registering an account, but some don't do this and you have to jump through hoops just to buy something (filling address, e-mail, phone number, and confirming e-mail, etc). It adds too much friction, which is why people prefer Amazon. All their details are pre-filled and third-party merchants just grab those details for orders.

logicalmonster• 4 years ago

A well-known issue on Amazon is the reviews being for the wrong products.

Shitty companies sell some cheap widget and gain some good reviews (and whether those are genuine or not is a big question too).

Then they change the product profile for a completely different product, but retain the positive reviews.

If you don't look carefully, you won't notice that a high review score is for a cheap toothbrush, not the expensive flashlight you're trying to get.

navjack27• 4 years ago

I don't have any problems except for wanting more options for picking a delivery date. Sometimes I don't want all the boxes to arrive at the same day and I don't want to have to put off buying something to the next day in hopes that my delivery options let me pick an entirely different set of days.

Searching works fine. I don't give a fuck about reviews because nobody ever knows what they're actually talking about.

simonblack• 4 years ago

Clothing that doesn't fit.

Clothing that doesn't have a pleasant texture. (feels like coarse cloth, rather than smooth, like silk)

Clothing that is made of the wrong materials. (looks like cotton, but actually polyester or nylon.)

What's the most painful thing about online shopping?

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