Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids
jeviz.com
jeviz.com
Many of these sub-categories have useful filters that aren't available in the general product list, but if I want to use them, I must open tabs for each category.
If this site could do a union on all the categories, offering sub-filters where available, filtering in the products that meet those filters and categories, out the products that have different categories, and in the products that have no categorization at all for that filter, that would be very useful.
On the other hand, if Amazon would just do a better job of curating the metadata on all these products, that would be great too. Maybe it takes a full time effort for a few people to maintain the compatibility lists for all the phone cases on Amazon. But that has to be more efficient than having thousands of under-informed consumers try to repeat that work over and over again...
1-) Choose sort by Most Reviews, which is an sort option Amazon generally hides
2-) From Average Customer Review choose 4 stars and & up
this will sort all products that are 4 or above stars but in most reviews order.
- The interface is overwhelming. While I understand that you aim to surface power, I think you're not targeting a specific power well enough to cater to a user's needs. For example, if you aim to help a user find deals, you should develop an interface that targets that super power.
- Related to ^, I'm wondering why a user would ever need some of these features... like why would I want to search by hidden keywords?
- Re: branding. I feel like you haphazardly went for a 5-letter dot com, when you could have done something more memorable like amazonhunter.com
- I'd add some indication of how long the tour is. Felt like I clicked for a while. Maybe I'm just impatient.
- Highlight the input that the tour popup is currently referencing in some way (eg add blue focus border)
- All of your inputs have explanatory text below them, and no labels. They also have no spacing to show what goes with what. You should add labels above the inputs, and put the explanatory text in a tooltip
- You have a breadcrumb kind of display on the top right side. Usually that's on the top left. I also expected it to be interactive since it is styled in blue, like a link
- Can you put the search results in an iframe or something, keeping the user on the same page? Opening a new tab was unexpected.
From a functionality standpoint, I think this works great. I wish amazon would let me search by all these features. This saves a ton of time and headache with searching amazon.
One final thought. It would be great if it supported smile.amazon.com. I support the "Youth Competitive Programming Circle" with all my purchases. It would be nice if all the links went to smile.amazon.com instead of straight amazon.com.
Overall I like it. Keep at it.
Try to normalize unit prices, the absence of which I presume is for Amazon to move whatever product they prefer.
I played with resizing the window of my Chrome browser to see how it would react, and the UI is resizing really well. However I did it quite a few times, from phone size to desktop size, and after a bunch of times the sidebar (with categories)'s scrolling is getting more and more sluggish. Just so you know.
What does this mean? Is it a typo for blogged, a new social network used by Knuth and Shteyngart, or a word I've never heard of?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385542364/ref=s9_qpp_gw_d...
Editorial reviews by Oprah, someone from the NYT, People, NPR etc.
I've wondered, is there a way to combine book format searches? Books have Paperback AND Audio CD, for example?
Sad though, once one considers what Amazon has begun as: a search engine...
And yes, somehow and for some reason most ecommerce sites are not good at filtering their data on more criteria in categories...
If you have a better way to do it, Amazon is hiring and I am sure they would love to hear your ideas.
They only recently started to change their recommendation stack, after years of using outdated technologies. I think it is somewhat similar with search.
It's not so much that "it's complicated at their scale" as "It works somewhat okay, which translates into X hundreds of millions of $, so don't touch it".
I know they could (and they most probably do) run A/B tests, but the thing is, how do you run MVT tests on such a large infrastructure, with such a varied catalog, etc...it all gets very complicated at their scale, just from an org perspective.
Many "power users" complain about the state of Amazon search, but I doubt the average joe really cares about that.
A more recent (and with a much smaller catalog) player, zalando (rocket internet) has a modular org and a modular approach to their stacks and they, apparently, change or update their tools much more often than Amazon.
I am pretty sure zalando being more "agile" come from their much smaller size (both in inventory, turnover and org).
Large organisations have a harder time moving than smaller ones, after all...
I'd be a constant user for Amazon DE. Can help you out with testing.