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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

> customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.”

Actually there is one thing people are starting to desire -- less choice. I think some kind of curated content for anything has a lot of potential because mostly I do not care if I get the 100% perfect thing, I care about it being 80% right and not a headache. The time investment is not really worth the trouble to find the perfect thing.

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Exactly why Costco is more and more popular. They essentially do curation of goods available on the market and they sell them at a good price. When I go to Costco I know I might not get the best item on the market, but I know I will get a decent product that fits my needs at a decent price. It is all about saving mental energy for other things.

Well said. I just ordered a 4k monitor for my home office from Costco - it was basically the only model they sell. My normal mode of operation is to spend hours trying to research the specs that matter, find a good price, etc. Instead, I assumed I was getting something reasonable and bought it without any research.

Given that today’s sellers make it nearly impossible for a consumer to compare items (store exclusive SKUs, component swaps in same SKUs, astroturfed reviews, and even inventory co-mingling), a curated marketplace is worth so much.

>Actually there is one thing people are starting to desire -- less choice.

Maybe not less but easier choices. It's hard to tell which frying pan is the best when there's 100 nearly identical listings all with 5000+ 5 star ratings which may or may not have been gamed. There's not a great way to tell the objective quality of a product before you buy it.

This is why I've begun prioritizing returns and exchanges and good customer service. Even with a high-quality product it's possible to get a lemon. Doesn't matter if I can just return or exchange within a reasonable time-frame.

I think it's partially true and I definitely fall under the category that hates to sink hours into searching for the best YYY where YYY is a random $30 item. But I don't necessarily want less choice, I just want something/someone I can trust. If I could just believe that the "amazon choice" was actually tested thoroughly and matched a quality standard I can get behind, then I'd happily get the "amazon choice" of most things.

I think that's true for fungible goods - it's a pain when you search for something generic like dish soap on Amazon and get 10000 kinds - but not for non-fungible goods. When it comes to books, I want Amazon to have as wide a selection as possible.

True, maybe that's the context of the original quote. I don't think about Amazon anymore as a book store so my mind went somewhere else.

I think this maps to some of the alternate "bets" at the bottom of the post:

- Faster solutions to problems ("buy the best widget for me" button > two hours of amazon + google + reddit research)

- Increased confidence/trust (trusting that "buy the best widget for me" really is the best widget for me, not the one with the highest affiliate-link returns)

I've been thinking that I would be willing to actually pay somebody commission to buy me the best, well researched, widget from vague description. Surely it has to be more efficient to have product research as one's job than to have to do it once every couple years and then choose something you're not very satisfied with afterwards anyway. But there are multiple levels of perverse incentives that I just have no clue how they could be solved.

I don’t think you mean 80% right. You mean 100% right on the things you care about. If I need a widget that fits some size, is child-safe, doesn’t quickly break and costs less than $300 I can’t accept 80% right. Sure I don’t care about the color or brand but they weren’t criteria of mine to begin with.

> Or, “I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.” Impossible.

Given the externalities involved in Amazon style delivery, I personally wish they would optimize more for throughput than latency.

That might be for you. I actually prefer options and customization and if it's taken away I'm more annoyed than if I never had it.

People are definitely different and that people want choice has definitely been correct for a long time. But I'm noticing it not only in me, but with people around me -- they're just tired from dealing with choosing from 100 different things when they only need 3. Especially because most of them are the same. The internet has made this worse than ever. Companies like Apple have shown this is possible - they basically tell the user "this is what you need" and people accept it and it's worked.

I prefer having the choices I want not being submerged in an ocean of crap.

I think similar but maybe not quite the same as you.

Crap has a place sometimes. But I want the same things to be grouped.

IE I don't need one knockoff product with 30 different brand spellings of random letters taking up 30 slots of space in my viewport.

Show me:

- that option, price range, ability to dig deeper into that if I want.

- 29 other things.

There are already things that solve choice, e.g. brands and reviews.

Perhaps I'd understand what you meant with an example? What products are you finding is too varied?

Do those solve it? I don't really trust either. When everything is made in China anyway, sometimes those garbage-looking Chinese brands are just as good as or better than the name brand stuff, and sometimes they aren't.

Some brands build a lot of reputation on quality, and then cash it in for higher profits by suddenly switching to low quality (American appliance brands were notorious for this, with a sort of round robin selection on which brand had actual quality behind it for any given year).

> There are already things that solve choice, e.g. brands and reviews.

Agreed with this, which is essentially why Amazon's e-commerce is probably doomed. Reviews have become unreliable and brands lack consistency on their site (is it fake? is this an officially branded product? who is actually selling me this?)

This is why I've got my bet on Shopify.

> What products are you finding is too varied?

I would argue virtually every category suffers from too much choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

"Doomed" seems a strong take, but I totally agree that Amazon is leaving e-commerce ripe for disruption if they don't address the trustworthiness of their reviews.

The paradox of choice would be mitigated by better trust, and better user interface. These aren't necessarily easy problems to solve, but Amazon should have the resources to solve them, if it only had the will.

I'm not the person that you replied to, but have you tried searching for e.g. usb memory sticks on Amazon?

Exactly this.

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