HACKER Q&A
📣 wojciii

Why is Amazon unwilling to implement proper sorting?


(knowing that many SW devs work for Amazon..)

I'm wondering if the way Amazon product search is implemented is intentional or it has missing features that no one bothered to implement.

1. I'm unable to remove Chinese sellers from search results on Amazon (I'm using German Amazon). I have to pay a large amount in import tax when buying outside EU.

2. I'm unable to remove sellers which don't want to ship to my country of residence (DK). I don't see any value in looking at items which I'm unable to buy or finding out after I try to buy something that this is not possible.

Why is #1/#2 not implemented? Does this make sense to anyone?

  👤 thunkshift1 Accepted Answer ✓
I strongly suspect its intentional. If you search for something on Amazon and then sort by price (lowest), unlike other sites the first few multiple pages of the results will be of very cheap related products but not the exact one you are searching for. Ex: if you search for ‘shoes’ and then change sort from featured to price, your first few pages will be things like shoes laces, shoe polish, shoe soles etc.

This is totally unlike how things are on other shopping sites. (Try this on amazon vs Walmart)

This achieves two things from amazons point of view: 1. More often than users will be trained to go with featured. 2. It gives amazon the advantage of putting whatever they want in featured.

So amazon has successfully placed itself between the seller and the customer and modified user behavior so they (usually) go with what amazon wants you to buy (featured items) vs what you want to buy (cheaper items)

👤 api
I suspect it’s the same reason socials love algorithmic timelines. These things are not optimized for efficiency. They are optimized to keep you on the site and to influence you. Amazon also makes money off sponsored results that get foisted into your search results, etc.