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> a lack of options can be a luxury

Definitely. I worked for a couple of years on a startup that aimed to help people make better shopping decisions. In user interviews and tests, we really saw the pain. The technical term for this is "tyranny of choice". [1]

One important distinction here is that shopping behavior tends to fall into one of two modes, optimizer and satisficer. [2] Satisficers just want to pick something adequate; optimizers want to pick the best thing. Everybody does both, but people tend toward one side or another.

People here surely skew toward optimizer, so the problem is especially painful for us. Amazon's reviews have become so reliable that my first stop will often be something like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, or SweetHome. Knowing that some other optimizer has already done the research lets makes me more comfortable making a satisficer-style choice.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/17723028

[2] http://abundancemeasures.blogspot.com/2012/01/choice-part-ii...

I'll confirm your anecdote RE: using other websites for curated reviews. I recently needed a new router; instead of wading through the innumerable search results on Amazon, I simply chose Wirecutter's recommendation.

100% agree. The Wirecutter rocks.

I've been doing that too. My experiences have generally been good, but I do feel a bit of unease at basically giving them somewhat blind trust.

I usually look through a few brands that haven't irked me yet on OpenWRT's HCL since I'll stick that on anything I'm likely to buy anyway.

In Europe (mostly the German and English speaking parts) there's a search engine for "stuff", formerly only computer-related things, that is often used for this: http://geizhals.de/

Their unique features are curated filters (boatloads of them, extremely handy to narrow choices down) and accurate, non-fake reviews and ratings.

This removed 95 % of the annoyingness in buying hardware for me: 1.) Define requirements 2.) Apply filters on gh 3.) Check reviews for the few resulting choices 4.) Buy.

The same thing for Ukraine is hotline.ua

I'm surprised there's no service like that in US.

> Amazon's reviews have become so reliable

Did you mean unreliable here?

Maybe an ironic inversion.

I absolutely did. Thanks!

Do you have any numbers or reports on population distribution that fall into each type, optimizer and satisficer? I have never heard this before and find this topic very interesting.

I don't have that handy, but I'd start with the book "The Paradox of Choice" and the author's academic work. The phenomenon also goes by the name "maximizer vs satisficer", and you might check the psychological literature for that.

Also, how do you tell a crap restaurant from a great one? A crap one has 400 items on the menu, while a great one has 5.

Amazon's search system is terribly broken, in many way. For example, if you try to sort by price, perhaps to find the cheapest option, then the results will be filled with random other items from completely unrelated products, no matter how exact your search is, or whether or not you are searching in one department/section or another.

God, yes. Searching by price gives you a price-first ordering of every possible result for any part of your search term.

I think it's a problem with 3rd party sellers being chronically incapable of listing their products correctly.

Overall the platform would benefit from at least a small amount of manual curating.

Sorting by best score is equally useless. You get random products that have one 5 star review that are often nothing like what you actually searched for. A better method would be the one described here[0], which reddit uses for its "best" comment sorting.

[0]http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

I think for me the main issue is the lack of a decent search. Take for example buying a power supply from Newegg.com or Amazon.com:

I want a 750W PSU, made by Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, or NZXT with at least 4 Molex, at least 1 GPU power (8pin) and a Platinum efficiency rating.

With newegg I can set those filters, then sort by lowest price or highest reviews or re-evaluate the filters.

With Amazon I can search for 750W Power supply, and then maybe have some of the choices on the left, but not every vendor lists their product correctly.

They did something I have yet to understand (unless their plan was to allow non-verified reviews to flood products): they changed the “smart” average filter they had before to something that sucks. Before, if you chose to sort by “Average Customer Reviews”, it would intelligently throw first results as the ones with most reviews, and of those the most positive. Now it just sorts by “quality” of those reviews, so you item may have two five-star reviews and appear first than a thousands four-star review average item. It sucks. Also, I don’t see the option to filter further by verified buyer reviews from the search: I have to go to the item itself and do it on the customer reviews section.

All in all, yeah, Amazon is starting to suck bad on quality of products, or rather, quality of searching of products.

This makes me a bad person, but I just go to Newegg to search and then buy from Amazon.

Newegg leaves a bad taste in my mouth. "Pay $3 extra to have your order processed _today_!" Do they still do that?

That said, B&H is quickly becoming my favorite photo/electronics store. But you have to buy from somewhere else when they go on a 2 week vacation (or sundown Friday to sundown Saturday ;)

B&H is the best. Their search and overall UI is great, their browsing taxonomy is incredible (especially when you're looking for something in their wheelhouse; if you're shopping for, say, a very specific type of camera lens, it's effortless to narrow to exactly the choices you want), and on top of all that, they're usually price-competitive with Amazon.

Their closing on orthodox Jewish holidays takes a bit of getting used to, but I just consider it part of the brand now.

It's nice that people don't give up their heritage to make a few extra dollars.

Also the way Amazon averages reviews is... interesting to say the least.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B01B6ZI2Y8/ref=cm_cr_dp...

tl;dr version: http://imgur.com/a/eXWFE

> I just want the top 5 or 10.

Why not go to a normal shop, or that shop's website?

You probably know which shops sell budget, middle and high-end furnishings. They've made the effort to filter 50,000 products to the 10 or so which they sell.

For example, Ikea have 138 bed sheet sets. An obvious filter, like "green", leads to about 10 different products.

My local fancy department store has 160 sets, "green" filters that down to 18.

Well, yeah. That's what I'm going to end up doing because Amazon is such a disaster at this point.

Well, to be fair, Ikea has 138 bed sheet /patterns/.

They have three different underlying sets (not counting size combinations).

Similar with furniture, for each item there's typically a low-end, medium-end, and high-end option/style (relatively speaking) and only color variations for each.

>Why not go to a normal shop

Amazon Prime is a lifestyle.

People are increasingly choosing to forego cars and live in trendy urban neighborhoods. Ground-level storefronts give these places energy and atmosphere and "walkability," but the practical retail (bodegas, drugstores) tends to be overpriced, and the rest of the retail tends not to be practical (my block is a "lite" version of this and includes boutique clothing, $10,000 furniture, and "tasting room" that could be mistaken for a bar except it closes at 9pm).

People want Target, Kohl's, IKEA, and other suburban shopping mall products at their suburban shopping mall prices, but when you're car-free, those stores are hard to get to and really hard to get back from with cargo. So you do your shopping on your laptop and let the UPS man do the hauling for you. Amazon Prime's delivery speed softens the blow of delayed gratification, so you prefer it whenever possible.

You might feel like a helpless child dependent on the real adults to bring things to you (or drive you around) - I know I did when I lived this way - but I have to admit the efficiency of a few rarely-parked usually-full delivery vehicles buzzing around beats acres of cars languishing in parking spaces until their owners' next shopping trip.

Hmm, I don't have enough experience of America.

In Europe, trendy urban neighbourhoods and depressed urban neighbourhoods both have a good selection of local shops. The former will have the more expensive shops, naturally.

This includes food, furniture, electronics and so on. There's not likely to be a single store selling everything, but there probably are stores selling most electronics, or most furniture.

US suburban stores can afford to have low markup and enormous selections because the square feet are basically free, and proximity to customers isn't much of a disadvantage because customers drive by default.

Once you've gotten used to this, paying the markup and dealing with the small selections necessitated by urban real estate costs is painful. It'd possible you'd find it perfectly normal, but someone raised in the US suburbs would probably not.

Depressed neighborhooods here are often considered food deserts as they have only fast food and convenience stores, but no supermarkets for miles.

Sheets and Apple chargers are two great examples of Amazon at its worst. The chargers have been a problem for years, and have been posted about many times before.

Just recently there was a big controversy about Wal-Mart selling "Egyptian cotton" sheets that were sourced from Egypt. Good luck buying "Egyptian cotton" sheets on Amazon that aren't poor quality microfiber.

(I used to be skeptical of business models like Casper but now I get it—a lack of options can be a luxury)

There are also outfits like The Wirecutter and The Sweethome that attempt to wade through all the stuff and find what's actually good. I wouldn't call either perfect but they are pretty good and a good place to start.

Places like Blue Apron are also now opening "marketplaces" that have specific stuff (https://www.blueapron.com/market) that seems somewhat better than randomly picking off Amazon or Google.

Yes, I agree that reviews cannot be trusted. When I was shopping for a probiotic, the 5 stars products were mostly filled with paid reviews where the reviewer gets the product at a discount for their "honest" review.

>There's big money in someone taking Costco's model of picking the handful of products in a category that will work for most people and applying it to Amazon.

They're more or less attempting to do so with "Amazon's Choice", no?

https://www.amazon.com/b?node=12691228011

> With some products, of course, this isn't a problem—books, for instance

Don't be so sure. I've run across counterfeit books on Amazon before. The quality of them was vastly inferior (covers printed on inkjets and laminated, basically), and of course no money is actually going to the author. I'd much sooner buy a real softcover book than a fake hardcover book.

It's too bad, it used to be incredibly useful, not it's just a way I pre-shop before I look at some place I can trust to make an actual purchase.

> Problem is, if I can't trust the reviews, how do I sort the shit from what I actually want?

Purchase only "Best Seller" items?

This whole article is about how the "best seller" chargers and cables are fakes that can burn your house down and destroy your electronics. I just checked and the 2nd best selling item in laptop chargers category is a fake Macbook charger.