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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

Except that Amazon is no longer the cheapest source for many products. Their outrageous storage and fulfillment fees make most of their pricing higher than local store deals or even manufacturer's own websites.

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Came here for this. Amazon actually buries the cheapest price products in many searches I have done.

eBay is not any better at this point. They are all squeezing to show higher priced products so they can make more money, obviously.

Hate to say this but Walmart still seems committed to providing the lowest prices.

FWIW, speaking as a seller, the conventional wisdom is that number of separate orders for a given item as a result of a given search term is the primary driver of search result ranking. Not revenue maximization, in other words.

Maybe you're right, but this is self-serving and not serving the goal of presenting the cheapest products to customers. There are so many low-quality products on Amazon. Often the packaging is outrageously wasteful as well. For a bottle of supplements, they often sent a box within a box, filled with so much plastic, paper, etc. The environmental impact on Amazon is huge!

Actually, I would make the case that this is best for customers. Amazon would be better served by optimizing for revenue (so higher prices would rank better), but customers are best served by what other customers like/bought (so number of orders would rank better). Also, products have plenty of opportunity to surface in search results. We have some top ranked items and Amazon constantly rotates products through all parts of the search results. Probably the reason that you're seeing lower cost items ranked lower is that they're not very good products. The listing copy and images are probably bad, so the listing doesn't convert. Or there are lots of returns. Stuff like that.

Not really. When I'm looking to buy product A at the lowest possible price, I don't care what somebody with totally irrelevant to my needs have purchased. Also, the quality of product names and description with Amazon is below any decent standards! They shut down my Amazon Pay account as I had an out of stock item, which didn't have Nutrition Facts. But, tell me, how many of Amazon products have those labels? Most of blury pictures, often outdated, etc. If only they apply the same standards to their stuff!

This is good insight. I have done some searches recently and found products that are at the best price seem to be buried. Maybe it's because they are bad products.

Amazon isn't close to being cheapest. Now, many of the things I shop for are twice the price of other internet businesses. Some of those businesses charge for shipping, but they are still cheaper than Amazon.

Amazon has really lost their way this year. I won't be buying a single thing for Xmas from them.

90% of the stuff I buy on Amazon is supplements, and they deliver the worse possible experience. First, stuff constantly goes off their Subscribe & Save program, second, often they can't deliver supplements, which are readily available elsewhere. They know exactly how much stock they need for the next month, but they do no effort to deliver it, which essentially forces me to leave Amazon. Other things are hit-and-miss. Recently, I get much the stuff being dirty from Amazon their own labels covering up FDA-required info for supplements. When you try to remove those, they are not made for easy removal and your supplement bottles get all sticky and even dirtier. This is the worse supplement delivery experience ever!

Don't buy supplements on Amazon. I've received supplements with poorly printed labels of popular brands slapped on them.

You're right. I'm not sure why regulations turn a blind eye on Amazon all the time.

Don’t buy supplements.

Never EVER buy food products on Amazon, you are playing russian roulette with your life, so much fake/counterfeit/poison.

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