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Comment by mqus | Hacker News Reader

I always go there not only when I need a cheap vendor, but especially when I don't know exactly what exists on the market because they have such a superior index and filter for finding the product you search for.

Especially Amazon is exceptionally bad, Even if I sort by price it isn't guaranteed they really show them in order and even if they do, the filters/search terms are often so broad that sorting from cheap to expensive just shows 100 pages of crap first.

Idealo is somewhat fine in terms of capabilities but I think the geizhals UI is far superior.

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Plus GH does not nag you about being a robot and please solve captchas like crazy when I am behind corporate VPN...

I use a local equivalent (Tweakers Pricewatch). I've been using this since what feels like the late 90ies, and like you, I never quite saw the appeal of Amazon. I've been buying online since the 90ies, and that experience is still the same. Amazon, or any other 'marketplace', has not improved on that. Their selection is of course wider, but it's just unpleasant and a huge time sink every time. But even that a local competitor (bol.com) does better.

GH is a different realm than tweakers.net, the number of many product attributes GH tracks and allow you to filter for is 10 fold of Tweakers.

Filters and categories are (sub) category specific on Tweakers; did you descend down into categories on Tweakers?

In any case, it does not take much to be leagues better than Amazon, which gets you a usually nothing more than a price and color filter.

Any vendors who start selling Chinese stuff, is part of deal to not allow excluding items from search results?

Amazon do not have any options to excludes items that ship from China. https://daraz.pk, largest online shopping store in Pakistan bought by AliBaba recently, has done the same. There is only one checkbox named China to show only Chinese items but there is absolutely no way to exclude items shipping from China.

Doubtful, as Aliexpress does allow something like that (last time I checked).

> Especially Amazon is exceptionally bad, Even if I sort by price it isn't guaranteed they really show them in order and even if they do, the filters/search terms are often so broad that sorting from cheap to expensive just shows 100 pages of crap first.

Because Amazon shows what 'it wants to sell to us' (even 'Recommended' varies with users) and not what 'we need'. They have enough data to guess what we need, but they use it to sell what they want with enough gimmicks(What others bought, Fake ratings/reviews etc.) to make the average person think that's what they need.

I usually do that as well. But sometimes the properties of a product are not maintained correctly and you might miss out on certain manufacturers completely. Last time this happened to me was when looking for a new TV. Sony was completely filtered out although some of their TVs had all the features i was looking for.

TLDR: The (wrong) filter settings might make you blind for the whole range of the market.

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