Amazon's sort just flat out doesn't work, I don't understand it, it's obviously not incompetence (and anyone can call a std lib `sort` fn on a given field anyway) so I don't understand why it's an option, why it pretends that sorting by price is something that you can do.
It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee, which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) - even including shipping the order just seems all over the place. I can only assume it's paid-for rankings etc. with no indication of that to the user, but it's a crap site. As a business/seller/provider of goods it's great, and gets too much of my money, but the site really is crap.
I'm glad I'm not the only one for whom sort by price has never worked!
They also have tried to specifically promote their clothes and shoe-selling business within Amazon.com, but those have especially bad interface for figuring out price and all. For example, if there are 20 colours of jeans on the same page (e.g., it's considered the same item, just in different colour), do I really have to click to each one of them to find those that are the cheapest and/or are on sale?
And the sort never working by price is just ridiculous. I think it's been like that for years, really amazing that they've never fixed it. Never works even if you select Amazon.com as the only seller.
I was at an Amazon all-hands years ago (I haven't worked there for years) and I saw an employee ask Bezos what Amazon was going to do about the poor quality of search. Bezos brushed off the criticism and said the search team did good work.
I don't know why. Maybe he earnestly thinks it's good, or just has different priorities. But I don't expect it to get better.
I was there too when someone asked why Google seemed to always have better search results for Amazon.com than Amazon itself, and I remember he said that if you always start searching on Amazon and only fall back to Google when you don't like Amazon's results, you'll notice when Amazon has poor results and Google has good results, but not the reverse. Something of a copout perhaps, but I thought it was an astute observation.
> I wish there was a way to just download the catalog and query/search/sort it myself though.
That would be nice and not entirely without precedent, since you can download some of IMDB's catalogue (owned by Amazon since 1998.) However I suspect this feature is a vestigial remnant of IMDB's earlier days on Usenet.
The best I can figure is that Amazon sort by price is using the lowest price from any new offer, even after you've narrowed to a specific seller. It might be some grades of used as well. It's also likely that the prices are periodically refreshed for the index, not live.
I don't have any real information though, other than a confirmation that it doesn't do what I want either.
How can a site this large get away with such a basic functionality not working as any of their users would want for such a long time? Did it ever work?
I think I've noticed it not working like 5 or 6 years ago when I was shopping for shoes, if not earlier than that. Keep in mind that even without Zappos, they're in the business of selling shoes, too, and have ran some crazy promotions around shoes, too.
Have you ever tried searching for apps on the Google/Android Play store? It's a complete disaster if you're trying to find something specific that's not in the top 20 apps. Given that Search is Google's specialty my personal conclusion is that search is fundamentally broken on the Play Store on purpose.
There are so many apps released constantly since their only hope is to get into "new apps" lists which lasts probably a week or so, if they don't get enough installs then it is usually the end.
So I guess google just heavily filters, limits and shuffles apps so they are somewhat evenly distributed but it does look to end users like a buggy search that can't decide if it has the app or not returning different results for the same query.
Whatever. If I enter the name of an app verbatim at the search field, Google should put that app at least around the first page of results.
Currently, it often doesn't. I don't care much about fairness for the app distributors, but I suspect the current schema is much less fair than a good search. (The phone ecosystems are all so broken, why doesn't anybody create one that works as the user says?)
I don't know if it ever worked; it's certainly not worked for a long time. I recall thinking that amazon is very good at optimizing things, but their targets are different from mine.
They can get away with it, because we still use them, I guess.
It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee, which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) - even including shipping the order just seems all over the place. I can only assume it's paid-for rankings etc. with no indication of that to the user, but it's a crap site. As a business/seller/provider of goods it's great, and gets too much of my money, but the site really is crap.