It's important to note that at least some of this problem is the fault of traditional retail. Aveeno MAKES all these ridiculous size and quantity combinations (at least some of these multipacks are shrink wrapped together). When a store stocks them, they choose to stock only a few. But Amazon is giving you GLOBAL insight into all available options Aveeno makes from any distributor who has access to them.
It would be nice if Amazon could make the comparison easier for us. But in this case most of the problem is that it's simply exposing the underlying wholesale/distributor model directly to the consumer.
Yes, that's very true. Even in brick and mortar stores, single manufacturers may provide multiple types and the retails often provide confusing information for comparing them. E.g. an 18 oz. Aveeno bottle with a price tag that shows $0.42/oz and a two-pack of the same bottle that shows 7.99/unit - and then perhaps a "SALE" tag attached that displays a different overall price and no further information.
For largely B2B McMaster Carr seems to have solved this. I can easily select items, the sizes, quantities and prices are all obvious. Amazon should strive for this level of simplicity for more of it's items. Especially compare the Amazon supply/small parts items to McMaster options. Did like the lotion described in the article is even worse.
I think a big part of McMaster's model is to be able to put a very high price on things, knowing that for business customers the time saved by having such a well-organized inventory is more than worth it.
They also white-label almost everything so that it's hard to go directly to their suppliers.
I'm guessing that that level of curation comes at a high cost to add new SKUs to the catalog; they go as far as to commission artwork and provide CAD models. It would be really hard for Amazon to approach that while striving for minimal margins and letting 3rd parties add SKUs in huge quantities.
However, with McMaster Carr they do not show the shipping charge until it is packaged and shipped. That can lead to sometimes surprising high shipping charges.
This is a part of a big problem in consumer products - a tons of confusing or missing data. Prices are hidden. A lot of the specification isn't shown(what's the wind strength of that fan in cfm, vs noise in db ? no i don't need marketing terms like "strong"), it's hard to compare by spec, and we don't know anything about long term reliability.
On the other hand, many b2b markets have that, because the buyers there demand it, and usually only buy a product with a spec.
Maybe there's some solution to that problem. But i do wonder, if it exists, would consumers use it to purchase stuff?
I used to work in Amazon Seller Support. It's a complicated issue when you build a platform for selling things, and then let anyone in the world use it without any training whatsoever.
You got a lot of sellers coming over from sites like eBay, where your listing is your listing. You upload an item to sell, it gets a page all to itself, and you can do whatever you want with the listing quality. Then they migrate over to Amazon because reasons, and can't cope with the fact that items for sale are grouped together with everyone selling that item. This leads to tons of shenanigans like people making up their own UPCs to get their own listings, using the wrong UPCs to get onto more popular listings, and all manner of trickery.
Occasionally you could catch a case with one of these malfested ASINs, and work with the catalog to unwind the broken mess. Unfortunately, more often than not, that wasn't your job to do that. Further, doing that would take a long time, which would destroy your average case resolve time. Better quality of the catalog was not job number one, only metrics, always metrics, ever increasing and eventually impossible to satisfy metrics. As far as I could tell, quality control wasn't anyone's job, and thus it led to the Amazon catalog you have today. It's almost as if Amazon has decided that bad quality listings will lead to low sales, and the problem will eventually sort itself out, but as we can see that has not happened.
For myself, before and after the job, I always look for Shipped and Sold by Amazon. Otherwise, you literally never know what you're going to get, and it's on you as the buyer if you want to take the gamble or wade into the waters of the A to Z return guarantee. But that's a whole other mess for another thread.
Thanks for the insight. That sounds about like what I figured while thinking about this.
And yeah, I think the "fulfilled by Amazon" filtering is the key to simplify things. It won't always be the best deal (and isn't in this case) but there is a real sense of "risk" with other options - something that I don't think can be solved by the third party store pages and seller feedback.
> And yeah, I think the "fulfilled by Amazon" filtering is the key to simplify things.
This is actually different from products shipped and sold by Amazon since Amazon now stores and ships products on behalf of its third party sellers as part of its fulfillment program in order to increase the number of products available under Prime.
So it's possible to receive a product stored and shipped by Amazon at their own facilities, but sold by a third party seller. The user to whom you replied searches specially for products sold by Amazon itself. Amazon is the seller in this case.
I think it's interesting that it appears aliexpress does much better at this - possibly because they don't have any equivalent of "shipped and sold by Amazon"? They don't compete with their power users on an unfair footing.
That "unfair" footing being the brand and logistics expertise that they built from scratch and later offered portions of, generally a la carte, to other sellers on the platform?
As a user I find Amazon astonishingly hostile when searching for products. Sure - the delivery, order process, support etc. is excellent, but I find it difficult to actually find products in the first place.
I appreciate they've used some kind of system to identify products and group the various options from different sellers into one listing. But I've never seen an example where this has worked well. The sizes, styles, colours and so on that are displayed are always completely mad. Like, enough to the point where I frequently abandon my attempt and just buy from somewhere with more sensible categorisation.
A lot of this is because of 3rd-party sellers. To make things easier, I usually filter by "ships from and sold by Amazon". Some of the pricing and "styles" for 3rd parties are ridiculous because they're algorithm-driven. That's likely why the $9.99/oz price happened. https://www.fastcompany.com/3060803/algorithmic-pricing-is-c... has some context on why and http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 talks about how . TL;DR Amazon picks (using their secret algos, ofc) which selection should be the default among the sellers. Everyone wants to be that to get more sales. Sellers then fix the price to a different item which has the price sometimes fixed to that other item, or potentially a loop with more products involved. They then proceed to algorithmically price each other far beyond normal costs for the item.
sure, it's "because" of the third-party sellers but it's still amazon's fault. If they want to provide options for third-party sellers in their product listings, it's amazon's responsibility to make sure those listings are correctly categorized.
Has anyone else been reduced to looking through hundreds of pages of results for common items like bottle openers or salt shakers? It's a nightmare, and there's often no good way to filter through them if you don't already know exactly what you're looking for and have an easy way to describe that. There's so much duplication even when the descriptions are different, and just so much junk.
Really awful user experience there, unless you have simply expressible needs or are satisfied with the first page or two of results.
Similar to the issues with categorisation and while people blame third-party sellers for a lot of the problems, one of the features that would be help would be being able to exclude third-party sellers from search results altogether.
When the Nintendo Switch and Zelda had just launched, Amazon had no stock of either but third party sellers conveniently had loads at below RRP. Call me a cynic (I didn't test the claim) but I'm doubtful I wouldn't get a S-S-S-Switch instead of the genuine article.
Currently having this problem buying baby shoes on Amazon. The four sizes are duplicated and it's hard to tell which colors are just outright sold out for the size I want. Plus I need to weed out the third parties that are either selling this for more than retail, and I just can't figure out which combination results in the cheapest price that is listed.
I will probably just give up on this and either buy whatever color I want or go in-person to a baby shop to buy them.
There is undoubtedly money to be made here (one way or another - see last reference): the supermarket chain ALDI has invested in a strategy where they provide limited choices of goods (e.g., spaghetti sauces, breads, etc.) thus reducing buyers' anxiety, store size and increasing profits. It seems to be working:
The paradox of choice only exists between things with meaningless differences!
The difference between these is the price of a single product, there is no paradox here, the user just needs to take over an hour + programming to even get the information out of Amazon.
I moved to Norway some years ago, and the grocery stores don't have as much choice. You might have 2 or 3 choices of canned tomatoes, but one choice if you want a can of beans. Sometimes, you just get the selection that store sells, and if you want something different, you have to go to another chain in another location. One of the chains reminds me a lot of aldi, though they tend to carry name brands for many products.
This is frustrating to me at times, after being used to the stores in the states. Overall, however, it makes grocery shopping quick. And as a bonus, I can generally stop by a store on my way home from anywhere or take a short walk from home.
It strikes me that I have recently done this in another area as well - grocery shopping. We used to go to the largest, cheapest grocery store, less than a mile from our house. But now we much prefer a smaller, more expensive place a few miles away. A bigger part of this decision is local/organic options and pricing, but I did recently think about exactly this (the incredible amount of choice and associated anxiety) when I had occasion to get a few things at the big store again.
Hmm. I like having choice in the sense that I can choose what I prefer and someone else can seek their choice as well. An alternative is only having access to the popular product in that segment (maybe I don't like Fujis, or I prefer whole milk over skim).
I think the paradox of choice is an issue when you initially don't have prior information on something, but once you know what you prefer, there is no paradox as one is pretty much settled with one's choice.
To me the real lesson of this post is something about analysis paralysis and losing financial perspective.
The majority of the options appear somewhere around $1-$2 per oz and it appears a typical bottle is around 10oz, so the difference here in the pricing is somewhere around $10. Worrying about this problem for more than about 10 minutes loses all the money you'd "save" by ensuring you're on the cheap end of that spread.
Sure, one shouldn't actually spend that much time picking which lotion to buy. But perhaps one should just shop elsewhere; and I think that's the point of this post. Amazon has become so full of counterfeits, confusing options, over priced third party sellers, etc., that for something like personal care products, most people these days would likely have a much higher quality experience starting off at drugstore.com or target.
Author here - this is perfectly true. I, perhaps ineffectively, tried to cover that briefly in the conclusion - basically I am worried about dealing with this sort of thing when I become a father in a few months. Expenses will rise, my wife's salary will fall, and time for doing this sort of research will be hard to find.
If you combine your story with the stories of counterfeit items sold by third parties on Amazon, you'll pretty much just never buy certain items from Amazon ever again.
I even found reviews for _counterfeit diapers_ on top of this problem of 10000 types of packaging for the same diaper and so now I just buy all my diapers and my prenatal vitamins from Costco.
Sure, if you only bought a single item once, but when you have a shopping cart full and a repeated purchases over the year, $10 here and $10 there can easily add up over the year. The article is clearly just highlighting the wider problem using a single product as an example.
Amazon.com also has a tendency to combine different (but related, sort of) products into the same page as different "sizes" or "styles" supposedly of the same product.
Reviews from all of these are merged, as are the Questions & Answers.
For a current example, https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0056OUTBK/ref=oh_aui_de... combines listings for computer cases in a variety of tower and rackmount sizes, server racks, drawers, and rails. Separate items all available as options on this page.
For reviews, Amazon now labels them with the "style", i.e. one review is for the "Server Rails" style, while another is for the "Server Case" style (though there are a half dozen different "Server Case" style items on the page, each with different characteristics). Questions & Answers are just a free-for-all that requires humans to sift through context and figure out which product is actually being discussed.
One of the questions on the linked product page, ironically asks, "Do I need rails to mount this in a rack?" It's a complicated question to answer because the question could have been posed about one of the many 2U or 4U cases ("yes", unless maybe one of them ships with rails) or it could have been asked about a tower case ("no, this isn't rack-mountable"), or it could have been asked about the rails or the rack themselves (as humans, we screen these possibilities out by context and logic), or about the shelves offered (not a completely unreasonable question -- maybe a shelf could be sold without rails?).
Or if we're not so observant, we click Buy after reading Q&A and reviews, only to later learn that we bought a different "style."
I really don't get on well with Amazon (uk). Finding products is hard. I mean there are things in life that you research, then there are things that aren't really worth researching. Examples: I wanted an Exercise Ball once, Or a waterproof bluetooth speaker.
These types of search yield generic cruft, and despite all the options, none of them seem to have any meaningful impact in the search.
The only other notable thing winding me up is ebay "not collection only".
> I wanted an Exercise Ball once, Or a waterproof bluetooth speaker.
If it helps, my strategy is usually to do five minutes of research through Google first and then just get the item from Amazon. The only things I discover through Amazon's search function are things that are more or less commodities, in which case I buy the cheapest that fits my constraints for whom reviews aren't horrible. I buy and have bought a LOT of stuff on Amazon and I've never experienced the choice paralysis or search issues everyone is talking about here.
I used to be like you until I discovered the thewirecutter.com. I own their recommended bluetooth speaker and it's been great. I've also bought luggage, a TV, <$20 ear buds, packing cubes and more based on their recs. I know this sounds like an advert, but it really is that awesome.
This unfortunately matches my experiences shopping for conditioner, toilet paper toothbrushes, toothpaste etc. on Amazon.
Someone on HN at some point made a web site that used to list the cheapest items in some common categories by unit price. It was called papersomethingorother, but I un-bookmarked it because it went down awhile back.
And it gets even worse when you find the typical retailer game where you list unit price for the same product in two different units (price per ounce for one size, and per gallon for another) so now have fun doing unit conversions too.
I can go to any of about four supermarkets between home and work, or two personal care stores, to buy toothbrushes, toothpaste, conditioner etc. The shops have chosen between three and ten or so lines from several manufacturers, depending which one I chose, and all the products are legitimate and meet the required quality and safety regulations. Searching online seems much harder than looking on a shelf and picking one.
(You may have fewer shops close by, but presumably there's at least one shop selling these goods.)
You can purchase products in larger sizes for lower $/[unit] and in many circumstances set them to be automatically purchased and shipped on a periodic basis for even greater savings all from the comfort of your couch.
You can additionally get 5% back on top of all of this if you use an Amazon Prime credit card and pay it off monthly.
The savings add up over time and it also results in a cart that is considerably less full during the weekly grocery shopping trip. Paper towels eat up a great amount of the volume in a standard US grocery store shopping cart.
The easiest way to avoid the pain many users experience is to exclusively purchase products shipped and sold by Amazon and to make use of third party sellers only when necessary.
Readit News
It would be nice if Amazon could make the comparison easier for us. But in this case most of the problem is that it's simply exposing the underlying wholesale/distributor model directly to the consumer.
They also white-label almost everything so that it's hard to go directly to their suppliers.
I'm guessing that that level of curation comes at a high cost to add new SKUs to the catalog; they go as far as to commission artwork and provide CAD models. It would be really hard for Amazon to approach that while striving for minimal margins and letting 3rd parties add SKUs in huge quantities.
On the other hand, many b2b markets have that, because the buyers there demand it, and usually only buy a product with a spec.
Maybe there's some solution to that problem. But i do wonder, if it exists, would consumers use it to purchase stuff?
You got a lot of sellers coming over from sites like eBay, where your listing is your listing. You upload an item to sell, it gets a page all to itself, and you can do whatever you want with the listing quality. Then they migrate over to Amazon because reasons, and can't cope with the fact that items for sale are grouped together with everyone selling that item. This leads to tons of shenanigans like people making up their own UPCs to get their own listings, using the wrong UPCs to get onto more popular listings, and all manner of trickery.
Occasionally you could catch a case with one of these malfested ASINs, and work with the catalog to unwind the broken mess. Unfortunately, more often than not, that wasn't your job to do that. Further, doing that would take a long time, which would destroy your average case resolve time. Better quality of the catalog was not job number one, only metrics, always metrics, ever increasing and eventually impossible to satisfy metrics. As far as I could tell, quality control wasn't anyone's job, and thus it led to the Amazon catalog you have today. It's almost as if Amazon has decided that bad quality listings will lead to low sales, and the problem will eventually sort itself out, but as we can see that has not happened.
For myself, before and after the job, I always look for Shipped and Sold by Amazon. Otherwise, you literally never know what you're going to get, and it's on you as the buyer if you want to take the gamble or wade into the waters of the A to Z return guarantee. But that's a whole other mess for another thread.
And yeah, I think the "fulfilled by Amazon" filtering is the key to simplify things. It won't always be the best deal (and isn't in this case) but there is a real sense of "risk" with other options - something that I don't think can be solved by the third party store pages and seller feedback.
This is actually different from products shipped and sold by Amazon since Amazon now stores and ships products on behalf of its third party sellers as part of its fulfillment program in order to increase the number of products available under Prime.
So it's possible to receive a product stored and shipped by Amazon at their own facilities, but sold by a third party seller. The user to whom you replied searches specially for products sold by Amazon itself. Amazon is the seller in this case.
I appreciate they've used some kind of system to identify products and group the various options from different sellers into one listing. But I've never seen an example where this has worked well. The sizes, styles, colours and so on that are displayed are always completely mad. Like, enough to the point where I frequently abandon my attempt and just buy from somewhere with more sensible categorisation.
Really awful user experience there, unless you have simply expressible needs or are satisfied with the first page or two of results.
When the Nintendo Switch and Zelda had just launched, Amazon had no stock of either but third party sellers conveniently had loads at below RRP. Call me a cynic (I didn't test the claim) but I'm doubtful I wouldn't get a S-S-S-Switch instead of the genuine article.
I will probably just give up on this and either buy whatever color I want or go in-person to a baby shop to buy them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
There is undoubtedly money to be made here (one way or another - see last reference): the supermarket chain ALDI has invested in a strategy where they provide limited choices of goods (e.g., spaghetti sauces, breads, etc.) thus reducing buyers' anxiety, store size and increasing profits. It seems to be working:
"Why I choose to have less choice":
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/18/choose...
"Why C[onvenience]-stores Should Consider the Aldi Approach":
http://www.csnews.com/product-categories/other-merchandise-s...
Finally, there's a debate as to whether the paradox of choice is real or not:
"Is the Paradox of Choice Not So Paradoxical After All?"
http://freakonomics.com/2009/12/02/is-the-paradox-of-choice-...
The difference between these is the price of a single product, there is no paradox here, the user just needs to take over an hour + programming to even get the information out of Amazon.
This is frustrating to me at times, after being used to the stores in the states. Overall, however, it makes grocery shopping quick. And as a bonus, I can generally stop by a store on my way home from anywhere or take a short walk from home.
It strikes me that I have recently done this in another area as well - grocery shopping. We used to go to the largest, cheapest grocery store, less than a mile from our house. But now we much prefer a smaller, more expensive place a few miles away. A bigger part of this decision is local/organic options and pricing, but I did recently think about exactly this (the incredible amount of choice and associated anxiety) when I had occasion to get a few things at the big store again.
I think the paradox of choice is an issue when you initially don't have prior information on something, but once you know what you prefer, there is no paradox as one is pretty much settled with one's choice.
Deleted Comment
The majority of the options appear somewhere around $1-$2 per oz and it appears a typical bottle is around 10oz, so the difference here in the pricing is somewhere around $10. Worrying about this problem for more than about 10 minutes loses all the money you'd "save" by ensuring you're on the cheap end of that spread.
I even found reviews for _counterfeit diapers_ on top of this problem of 10000 types of packaging for the same diaper and so now I just buy all my diapers and my prenatal vitamins from Costco.
Reviews from all of these are merged, as are the Questions & Answers.
For a current example, https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0056OUTBK/ref=oh_aui_de... combines listings for computer cases in a variety of tower and rackmount sizes, server racks, drawers, and rails. Separate items all available as options on this page.
For reviews, Amazon now labels them with the "style", i.e. one review is for the "Server Rails" style, while another is for the "Server Case" style (though there are a half dozen different "Server Case" style items on the page, each with different characteristics). Questions & Answers are just a free-for-all that requires humans to sift through context and figure out which product is actually being discussed.
One of the questions on the linked product page, ironically asks, "Do I need rails to mount this in a rack?" It's a complicated question to answer because the question could have been posed about one of the many 2U or 4U cases ("yes", unless maybe one of them ships with rails) or it could have been asked about a tower case ("no, this isn't rack-mountable"), or it could have been asked about the rails or the rack themselves (as humans, we screen these possibilities out by context and logic), or about the shelves offered (not a completely unreasonable question -- maybe a shelf could be sold without rails?).
Or if we're not so observant, we click Buy after reading Q&A and reviews, only to later learn that we bought a different "style."
These types of search yield generic cruft, and despite all the options, none of them seem to have any meaningful impact in the search.
The only other notable thing winding me up is ebay "not collection only".
If it helps, my strategy is usually to do five minutes of research through Google first and then just get the item from Amazon. The only things I discover through Amazon's search function are things that are more or less commodities, in which case I buy the cheapest that fits my constraints for whom reviews aren't horrible. I buy and have bought a LOT of stuff on Amazon and I've never experienced the choice paralysis or search issues everyone is talking about here.
Someone on HN at some point made a web site that used to list the cheapest items in some common categories by unit price. It was called papersomethingorother, but I un-bookmarked it because it went down awhile back.
And it gets even worse when you find the typical retailer game where you list unit price for the same product in two different units (price per ounce for one size, and per gallon for another) so now have fun doing unit conversions too.
It's all just a complete mess.
I can go to any of about four supermarkets between home and work, or two personal care stores, to buy toothbrushes, toothpaste, conditioner etc. The shops have chosen between three and ten or so lines from several manufacturers, depending which one I chose, and all the products are legitimate and meet the required quality and safety regulations. Searching online seems much harder than looking on a shelf and picking one.
(You may have fewer shops close by, but presumably there's at least one shop selling these goods.)
You can purchase products in larger sizes for lower $/[unit] and in many circumstances set them to be automatically purchased and shipped on a periodic basis for even greater savings all from the comfort of your couch.
You can additionally get 5% back on top of all of this if you use an Amazon Prime credit card and pay it off monthly.
The savings add up over time and it also results in a cart that is considerably less full during the weekly grocery shopping trip. Paper towels eat up a great amount of the volume in a standard US grocery store shopping cart.
The easiest way to avoid the pain many users experience is to exclusively purchase products shipped and sold by Amazon and to make use of third party sellers only when necessary.