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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

"Today, consumers can get more product information by reading "add to cart" pages on Amazon, or online product reviews on any number of platforms, than they can get from viewing advertisements on bill-boards or television, or through the advertising links placed by Facebook in its feeds and Google at points all across the web."

This creates its own set of problems. Companies looking to sell directly to consumers through their own website lose a powerful way of promoting their product to consumers giving entrenched retailers more power and more control over what is sold to consumers.

Does Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. not promote certain types of products over other, either subtly or overtly? What constitutes advertising?

I don't think anyone likes misleading or intrusive advertising, but to say that advertising is obsolete is either incredibly naive or put forth in intellectual bad faith.

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That quote made me laugh hard.

To everyone around me, I keep advocating a simple principle: never use e-commerce sites for product discovery and evaluation.

Reviews are thoroughly gamed, and have been for many years now. That applies both to vendor-owned stores, where you can assume they're all heavily moderated or fake by default, as well as marketplaces like E-bay, where bribing customers to remove negative reviews or give better ratings is a standard business practice for sellers.

Product descriptions - those are always purposefully misleading. Hyping up the positives, hiding negatives, avoiding to provide useful metrics, and doing everything possible to prevent you from comparing between alternatives.

The best way I've found so far is to look for communities of people using a given product category, and read up opinions. Not review sites - these are, with few exceptions, just ads in sheep's clothing. But smaller, purpose-oriented communities are much harder to game thoroughly. So personally, unless the product category I'm exploring has a recent review on WireCutter (in which case I just buy one of their top picks; never been burned this way), the first thing I do is googling "<product category> site:reddit.com" and do my research there.

So you never use Amazon for product discovery or evaluation? You've never gone to a store and said "I wonder what Amazon prices that at and what people say about it?"

Not a single time.

Sure I did. But by that time I know exactly what I want to buy - I've discovered the product and evaluated it compared to alternatives prior to setting foot in the brick&mortar store (I don't trust store salespeople either). I never do casually browse Amazon, or type a generic description and buy something from presented search results.

As for "what people say about" a particular product on Amazon, I don't even bother reading it.

>, I keep advocating a simple principle: never use e-commerce sites for product discovery and evaluation.

That strategy works better for some products. E.g. especially high-value products such as digital cameras where one can go to photography discussion communities to learn of real-world opinions on Canon vs Nikon vs Sony, etc before visiting amazon.com

However, for many other products, that doesn't work. E.g. I was searching for a small square pictures frames and large photo albums for some family pictures. None of the online communities[1] talking about picture frames are useful for this because they focus on custom frames instead of commodity items. In this case, just browsing amazon.com's "virtual shelves" or driving to a brick&morter store to see what they actually stock is the easiest way.

Another example of using amazon.com's reviews (even if they're gamed) was buying a temporary guest bed. (My previous comment.[2]) As far as I can tell, there really isn't focal point of online discussion for folding beds because no strong recognizable brand names emerge to converge lots of opinions on. Because folding beds don't attract discussions like Canon/Nikon cameras, it turns out most of the opinions are at Amazon.

[1] one example search of discussion forums: https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+frames+discussion+fo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24197305

Fair enough.

What I do for the product categories you mention - cheap commodity items - is I first decide how important are they for me. If I don't really care about quality (or it's a product that's almost impossible to make in bad quality), I'll order from the cheapest seller that doesn't seem fly-by-night (which I determine by metrics like "how old is the account/offer", "how many positive reviews the offer page has" and "what special site-specific markings the seller has". It's not bullet-proof, but the goal here is just to avoid dealing with fraudsters.

If I do care about quality, it depends on whether or not I can afford losing money and time on a bad item. If yes, GOTO previous paragraph. If not, I'll find a brand - any brand - that sells the item and order from them.

Also not mentioned: for a good chunk of such purchases I rely on word-of-mouth. If someone I know has a product in the category I'm interested in and they're happy with their purchase, I'll just buy the same thing they did, preferably from the same place they did.

The main heuristic I use: sellers are incentivized to lie, cheat and steal from you. Degree to which it happens depends, in general, on how much they can get away with. So I expect the official Nikon store to lie to me (deceptive marketing, bullshit specs, purposefully making it hard to compare across product category). I expect an e-commerce platform seller to lie and possibly cheat (that's entirely based on personal experience). Reviews are too easy to fake and bribe (I've personally know people who did it and I've been asked to participate many times, so I know how this works and how widespread it is).

Consumer Reports has a lot of good advice on smaller items like picture frames, but it doesn't come free (which is a good thing tbh).

I use Youtube largely for product reviews/showcasing. It's been the best method in my book.

I finally signed up for Consumer Reports, it's great. I've just bought things at their recommendation and so far haven't gotten any duds.

>where bribing customers to remove negative reviews

Wait, one can get money for negative reviews? Let's automate that..

Usually not money, but free items or discount on next purchase.

that quote is moronic simply for the fact that it assumes the purpose of advertising to is provide product information.

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