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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

"Collaborative filtering", "using past activity and stated preferences to guide us"

I can't think of areas Amazon does worse in today than these two areas.

Reviews are so untrustworthy they are just noise.

Those coffee beans I ordered a month ago? I have to go back to my orders page, search (and for some reason their search is dirt slow) - then wade through unrelated products to finally find them.

But oh, hey, you just bought a vacuum cleaner? I know what you would really like! MORE VACUUMS!

I guess they innovated on those two areas in 1998, and then since then the only thing they did was remove the `review-count-rank` sorting option so their AI can suggest Amazon Brand products.

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hey, you just bought a vacuum cleaner? I know what you would really like! MORE VACUUMS!

This is a common refrain, but I would be amazed if it weren't backed up by data and I anecdotally fit into the mold. If I buy a product that I really like, then I'm likely to buy it again to give as a gift to friends. If I buy something like a a vacuum and I don't like it, then I'm likely to buy a different model that better fits my needs. It seems silly when you aren't interested in buying another one of whatever item you bought, but there are multiple legitimate reasons that people would want to.

You'd buy a vacuum cleaner as a gift for a friend? I find that incredibly hard to believe but if it's true, it's very strange behaviour.

It truly is a gift that sucks

I did, not a month ago. Nothing strange about the process whatsoever.

I think the comment was that if they buy a vacuum and don’t like it, they return it and buy a different one. So if that happens 20% of the time, that next month has a much higher chance of buying “another vacuum” than the average month.

Also, I bought my parents a Roomba because I liked mine, so that can happen too.

A vacuum cleaner would be a great housewarming gift, for example.

Several years back a bunch of us pet-owning friends wound up round-robin gifting the same model SpotBot carpet cleaner to each other, because it was something we all agreed made our lives better. Nothing weird about it at all.

The fact that you had to preface this with you and your friends being pet owners kind of does make it a special case. You being suggested this vacuum cleaner by Amazon after buying it also doesn't do anything for you in this scenario because you bought the same one for your friends, so the recommendation wasn't needed. I think people are losing sight of the original argument which is that Amazon's recommendations can sometimes overemphasize recent purchases with very little context around what the items are.

Yeah, but everyone is "special case" in retail.

I've done it before: shortly after I bought a robot vacuum; I gave the exact same model as a birthday gift

Posting to confirm, having seen back-end sales numbers from (admittedly much smaller) vendors, the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high, across pretty much every category I cared to look at.

But surely if you just bought a <Roomba> and like it and intend to buy it again as a gift then you don’t need an advert for Roombas - (and showing you such an advert followed by you buying another Roomba is making the advert look more effective than it was) - and you definitely don’t need an advert for Bissel or Dyson, and you definitely don’t need a dozen adverts for Amazon PLINGBA BEST VACUUM, TYBCHO VACUUM EXPERT, DAOLPTRY VACUUM CLANER etc etc?

Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do, in terms of focused advertising driving sales. We can wonder why, but the data is exceedingly clear.

Well if those are the reasons then why not code it directly?

Ask the user if they liked the product and would likely gift it in the future and add the item to a "Gift ideas" list.

If the user returned then start suggesting immediately an alternative.

Blindly recommending the same thing just because there's a correlation seems stupid. Would be nice to at-least have a nicely visible button to stop recommending this item since I'm done purchasing anything similar for the next couple of years.

> But oh, hey, you just bought a vacuum cleaner? I know what you would really like! MORE VACUUMS!

Amazon did literally this to me just a couple days ago.

I'd bought a vacuum cleaner on Amazon a week earlier, and, when doing an Amazon checkout of a cart with one item, it threw up a list of consumable items that I'd bought in the past, to possibly add to the order... including another one of those $120 upright vacuum cleaners.

(Maybe they have data that says this makes them more money, even though I'd guess it might hurt customer confidence in the site.)

I don't know how the recommendation engines work, but if there are dollars there, i could understand this to be:

Amazon: Sellers! Do you want to advertise to customers interested in vacuums ? Seller: YES! Take my money!

(Amazon proceeds to uprank vacuums to customers with prior vacuum sales)

>But oh, hey, you just bought a vacuum cleaner? I know what you would really like! MORE VACUUMS!

I have worked on the same recommendation systems. It's also the most often oncall issue. The problem is mostly due to lag in event processing (especially orders).

Amazon had fewer items back then and the bar and complexity was lower too.

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