The short story (and only part of the story covered here but the answer to the headline) is that since Amazon and Google are competing, Amazon might be obscuring the details of people’s orders in...
The short story (and only part of the story covered here but the answer to the headline) is that since Amazon and Google are competing, Amazon might be obscuring the details of people’s orders in email confirmations so that Gmail can’t parse them to figure out your purchase history!
We can probably expect a lot more of this sort of adversarial action taken by monopolists against each other in ways that are annoying and make life more frustrating for users. But on the plus side, it also opens up opportunities for smaller players to differentiate themselves. A smaller e-commerce retailer that doesn’t depend on surveillance and promoted search ads to make their money probably cares a lot less if Google is inferring about consumer preferences.
The issue is that small commerce doesn't have (and will never have) the economies of scale of giants like Amazon. That means higher prices and slower delivery. Would people be willing to pay more...
The issue is that small commerce doesn't have (and will never have) the economies of scale of giants like Amazon. That means higher prices and slower delivery.
Would people be willing to pay more for the same thing (and have it delivered slower) because the order confirmation email is a bit nicer?
I get the idea that it won't be just the email, but other things too... I just think for most people it's entirely about price, and I doubt that's gonna change anytime soon considering how hard inflation has hit everyone.
In theory. In practice the internet is full of dropshippers that meet Amazon’s prices. And even real storefronts usually just have minimums before they’ll do free shipping.
In theory. In practice the internet is full of dropshippers that meet Amazon’s prices. And even real storefronts usually just have minimums before they’ll do free shipping.
Great. The corpos are officially fighting. How long until they start assassinating other board members and both all of Cyberpunk and also this WKUK sketch become the standard reality?
Great. The corpos are officially fighting. How long until they start assassinating other board members and both all of Cyberpunk and also this WKUK sketch become the standard reality?
Good point. But you're thinking like an engineer. If it's true that they nerfed confirmation emails globally to protect their metrics, that's a management or c-suite call. I doubt that was the...
Good point. But you're thinking like an engineer. If it's true that they nerfed confirmation emails globally to protect their metrics, that's a management or c-suite call.
I doubt that was the main motivation though, more likely they want to encourage clickthroughs into their walled garden. Probably motivated in part by a larger initiative to create more opportunities to expose people to their AI tools
This has been particularly frustrating for me because I just wrote a nightly script to help me identify Amazon charges in YNAB and I was using the order confirmation emails to do that. I swear...
This has been particularly frustrating for me because I just wrote a nightly script to help me identify Amazon charges in YNAB and I was using the order confirmation emails to do that. I swear like two days into the script working perfectly they stopped including product details.
I would have loved to borrow a copy of this from you. Perhaps there's an API one can use to get their own Amazon purchases? I'll add looking into that to my todo list to get to..eventually
I would have loved to borrow a copy of this from you. Perhaps there's an API one can use to get their own Amazon purchases? I'll add looking into that to my todo list to get to..eventually
Yeah, none that I can see for consumers. I'm now envisioning some home-baked browser extension that, on transaction purchase, writes the relevant data to a DB or JSON file, which can then be...
Yeah, none that I can see for consumers.
I'm now envisioning some home-baked browser extension that, on transaction purchase, writes the relevant data to a DB or JSON file, which can then be accessed by a process (cron probably?) and use YNAB's API to push the transaction.
Shouldn't it be relatively trivial to just mimic the API request the Amazon website makes? You can just open the browser dev tools on the order history page and see the request that gets the...
Shouldn't it be relatively trivial to just mimic the API request the Amazon website makes? You can just open the browser dev tools on the order history page and see the request that gets the history.
I've done the same with a different online marketplace and it worked well (although their website was directly returning HTML, which is still perfectly parseable, but I chose to reverse engineer their mobile app instead, which is a bit harder)
It is probably straightforward, but there are plenty of ancillaries you're not going to do with a curl script that they could pick up on (like, did your IP pull down the page that's supposed to...
It is probably straightforward, but there are plenty of ancillaries you're not going to do with a curl script that they could pick up on (like, did your IP pull down the page that's supposed to make this request within a reasonably recent window) and filter on.
(You could drive e.g. a Selenium instance, of course, but that's well outside the realm of "simple scripting". Also I think Amazon ships a fair amount of pre-rendered HTML? That's technically an API, but the "A" is a web browser and extracting structured data you care about may not be straightforward.)
The bigger problem is that those internal interfaces are likely to be frightfully unstable. It's not hard to do once, but if you're rewriting it weekly, it rapidly stops being worth the effort.
The last part was an issue before LLM assisted coding, but is a much lesser problem since. But the other big problem remains - the big guys have many tools to hinder automated scrapping and have...
The last part was an issue before LLM assisted coding, but is a much lesser problem since.
But the other big problem remains - the big guys have many tools to hinder automated scrapping and have much more energy deploying them than you fighting them.
Maybe there's an SAAS for that? Probably hidden behind some of those "search API" offerings.
Even with LLM assisted coding, I would hate having to waste usage or tokens (and time) every week just trying to fix a scraping script. Not to mention what you already did, which is the...
Even with LLM assisted coding, I would hate having to waste usage or tokens (and time) every week just trying to fix a scraping script. Not to mention what you already did, which is the anti-scraping tools out there.
It is mildly irritating, and they do have countermeasures for scraping which they actively look for. At very low volume it might be ok, but it quickly becomes very irritating at any kind of scale.
It is mildly irritating, and they do have countermeasures for scraping which they actively look for. At very low volume it might be ok, but it quickly becomes very irritating at any kind of scale.
A friend literally mentioned this last night. He ordered a cigar cutter from Amazon (I didn't even know they sold anything related to tobacco/nicotine). And he asked us what category the item was...
A friend literally mentioned this last night. He ordered a cigar cutter from Amazon (I didn't even know they sold anything related to tobacco/nicotine). And he asked us what category the item was listed as in the email. I joked "circumcision tool." But apparently, I wasn't too far off: It was classified as medical.
I hadn't noticed the change since I've reduced my Amazon buying somewhat.
I wonder if there's some sort of "adversarial categorization". My stud finder was classed as lawn & garden. It's not even a random brand, it's DeWalt. I'm not ordering enough that it makes it hard...
I wonder if there's some sort of "adversarial categorization". My stud finder was classed as lawn & garden. It's not even a random brand, it's DeWalt. I'm not ordering enough that it makes it hard to tell though, it was my first order in like 6 months.
I had an office chair cover classified as "bedding" and the clip art was a pillow. I thought I had ordered something by mistake until I opened the Amazon order page.
I had an office chair cover classified as "bedding" and the clip art was a pillow. I thought I had ordered something by mistake until I opened the Amazon order page.
I wonder if it's as simple as going by keywords? I had lock pin tweezers classified as "beauty", presumably because of "tweezers" which would also make sense with "cover".
I wonder if it's as simple as going by keywords? I had lock pin tweezers classified as "beauty", presumably because of "tweezers" which would also make sense with "cover".
Amazon’s data model is actually kind of terrible at categorizing stuff or helping you, as a customer, actually find stuff. They seem to rely mostly on search and fuzzy matching, but the way things...
Amazon’s data model is actually kind of terrible at categorizing stuff or helping you, as a customer, actually find stuff. They seem to rely mostly on search and fuzzy matching, but the way things are categorized in the database is terrible.
Is there a way to just turn these off? <rant> I actually haven’t bothered to look but 4 emails for one purchase is kinda useless to me, I turn notifications off for every single platform because I...
Is there a way to just turn these off?
<rant> I actually haven’t bothered to look but 4 emails for one purchase is kinda useless to me, I turn notifications off for every single platform because I want to seek out information that I need on my own in my own time instead of being strung along in 5 different directions with live updates from fkn my whole entire background life </rant>
I'm also considering turning off delivery confirmations altogether. I liked knowing when something was delivered, but now that it doesn't tell me what it is, it's significantly less useful. Kind...
I'm also considering turning off delivery confirmations altogether. I liked knowing when something was delivered, but now that it doesn't tell me what it is, it's significantly less useful.
Kind of related to your rant: Gmail lets you route emails so you don't get notifications. When you go to the settings, there's a "Filters and Blocked Addresses" section. You can make the filter match a certain from address or string, then set it to Skip Inbox, or Delete it, depending on what you prefer. The issue is it's not very intuitive IMO. I really would like to switch email providers, but I've had Gmail for over 15 years, so it's difficult to do.
I've noticed this more recently, but a lot of services like Paypal or Robinhood send me emails without the option to unsubscribe. I seriously don't need a statement for something I use every few months. It makes me think they intentionally do it so their platform is fresh in my mind.
My inbox its absolutely filled to the brim with random promotions from my utilities, my hsa, my insurance, all my healthcare providers, my university , statements from accounts I haven’t touched...
My inbox its absolutely filled to the brim with random promotions from my utilities, my hsa, my insurance, all my healthcare providers, my university , statements from accounts I haven’t touched in years, and seemingly something from every single website Ive ever friggin visited I swear.
I went to a concert last week and Ticketmaster MADE ME give them my phone number and so Ive had a spam call every hour on the hour all day starting yesterday.
If anyone actually needed to get in touch with me they wouldnt be able to because Im literally ignoring everything.
I use an email forwarding service almost always now. Like for my gym, the address is mygym.39djs@[service.domain], which forwards to my real email business@my.domain. I think I pay €36/year and...
I use an email forwarding service almost always now. Like for my gym, the address is mygym.39djs@[service.domain], which forwards to my real email business@my.domain. I think I pay €36/year and then, when I'm done with that service, even if just "for now", I just toggle it off. It then just stops forwarding emails it receives. It's brilliant. Hotel loyalty programmes aren't the hassle they used to be - constant drip drips before, now I just turn it on when I make a booking, and off again when I'm back. It's a game changer, for real. I changed maybe 20-30 things manually (utilities, banks etc.), but now I just change email addresses over to it as and when the need arises, to stop it being such a chore. I wish the same were possible for phone numbers where I am. Nobody would have my real number ever again!
Haha, yes I can see why you'd think that. I like it, though, it's very much a once-and-done kind of thing, you know? It also cuts off at the root any account details leaking. Whenever some crappy...
Haha, yes I can see why you'd think that. I like it, though, it's very much a once-and-done kind of thing, you know? It also cuts off at the root any account details leaking. Whenever some crappy corpo leaks out my address, I don't even care anymore. Or the shady ones that just ignore the "unsubscribe" process, not a problem. But I like a clean-ish inbox, I got annoyed by the clutter, which is a me problem, I guess.
I'm getting more spam calls lately, too. For me, I think it has something to do with the Framework data breach. Something also worth doing IMO is finding the unsubscribe link buried at the bottom...
I'm getting more spam calls lately, too. For me, I think it has something to do with the Framework data breach.
Something also worth doing IMO is finding the unsubscribe link buried at the bottom of emails. In my experience, it actually works for reducing spam (if you're persistent enough).
Tangentially related, a lot of companies offer a way to stop sending you physical junk mail. Sometimes they make you jump through hoops, other times they make you call to remove your address. At my old apartment, I managed to stop basically all junk mail!
Spam phone calls have gotten so bad that basically every phone call gets intercepted by the spam filter now. If you need me and it’s an emergency you better leave me a message or I might not even...
Spam phone calls have gotten so bad that basically every phone call gets intercepted by the spam filter now. If you need me and it’s an emergency you better leave me a message or I might not even realize you tried to contact me.
Re: spam calls I order a VoIP number that I pay maybe a buck or so for every month. All useless phone applications and texts go there. And I usually have it on mute. The text option doesn't work...
Re: spam calls
I order a VoIP number that I pay maybe a buck or so for every month. All useless phone applications and texts go there. And I usually have it on mute. The text option doesn't work 100% of the time but it's good enough.
Is this new, or maybe newly more consistent? Looking through my email archive, I see Amazon confirmation emails as far back as 2019 with minimal detail. Just "Thank you for shopping with us. We’ll...
Is this new, or maybe newly more consistent? Looking through my email archive, I see Amazon confirmation emails as far back as 2019 with minimal detail. Just "Thank you for shopping with us. We’ll send a confirmation when your items ship." with subtotal/total, estimated delivery date, where it's shipping to, and an order number linked to the status page behind a login. There are some mixed in with more detail, some template changes over the years, and some country/region differences.
That said, I'm torn. On the one hand, as a customer I love the convenience of having all of my order info in emails. A single, "unified" place to search for order history across all vendors, no age limitations, no individual logins, no product data changes reflected. On the other, I've seen how information sitting in inboxes or public "secret" unauthenticated order status links can be found and used by bad actors, and so from a security and privacy standpoint I'm happy to see less information in emails.
I'm not sure, because I've definitely received the vague emails, but my latest email confirmation has the full product information available including the name and picture of of the item.
I'm not sure, because I've definitely received the vague emails, but my latest email confirmation has the full product information available including the name and picture of of the item.
This behaviour seems to be only for the US store, at least for now, as all my Ordered/Dispatched/Out for Delivery updates from EU sites still refer to the specific item in both subject and body of...
This behaviour seems to be only for the US store, at least for now, as all my Ordered/Dispatched/Out for Delivery updates from EU sites still refer to the specific item in both subject and body of the mails.
Is it just me or is online shopping just stupid these days? I gave up impulse buying things online quite some time ago and canceled Prime not too long later. Shopping on Amazon now seems even more...
Is it just me or is online shopping just stupid these days?
I gave up impulse buying things online quite some time ago and canceled Prime not too long later. Shopping on Amazon now seems even more tumultuous now than it has ever been. Sometimes products don’t seem to actually have descriptions anymore, they just have summaries.
Relying on AI to purchase things for you is frankly the stupidest thing I could possibly imagine. It is counter to the entire point of online shopping - finding the best deals. AI does not know what these products are like. It has not held them in its hands. It doesn’t have human hands to begin with. Shopping is one of the most alien things you could ask it to do. You might as well ask it to evaluate your poetry recital.
But it seems to me that many online stores - Amazon is hardly the only one - aren’t so much in the business of retail as they are in the business of addiction marketing. They may have the things you need, but that’s just the in - it’s there to get you into the ecosystem that gets you addicted to buying cheap tat you don’t need.
Yeah it’s gotten really bad. I’ve started curating specific shops for specific things and the experience is so much better when everything is tailored to the type of shopping you’re doing. You...
Yeah it’s gotten really bad. I’ve started curating specific shops for specific things and the experience is so much better when everything is tailored to the type of shopping you’re doing. You basically can’t serve all needs at once. A website and data model designed to sell pens and stationary needs to make different choices from one selling electronics and camera equipment which makes different choices from one selling cables and home networking.
The examples I put up are all shopfronts that care about selling in the vertical they sell and everything makes sense for what they’re doing. The filter criteria are actually tailored to stuff you might want, the entries for each SKU are descriptive enough to let you make an informed shopping decision, and they don’t inject your queries with dodgy nonsense with brands you don’t know if you can trust.
The short story (and only part of the story covered here but the answer to the headline) is that since Amazon and Google are competing, Amazon might be obscuring the details of people’s orders in email confirmations so that Gmail can’t parse them to figure out your purchase history!
We can probably expect a lot more of this sort of adversarial action taken by monopolists against each other in ways that are annoying and make life more frustrating for users. But on the plus side, it also opens up opportunities for smaller players to differentiate themselves. A smaller e-commerce retailer that doesn’t depend on surveillance and promoted search ads to make their money probably cares a lot less if Google is inferring about consumer preferences.
The issue is that small commerce doesn't have (and will never have) the economies of scale of giants like Amazon. That means higher prices and slower delivery.
Would people be willing to pay more for the same thing (and have it delivered slower) because the order confirmation email is a bit nicer?
I get the idea that it won't be just the email, but other things too... I just think for most people it's entirely about price, and I doubt that's gonna change anytime soon considering how hard inflation has hit everyone.
In theory. In practice the internet is full of dropshippers that meet Amazon’s prices. And even real storefronts usually just have minimums before they’ll do free shipping.
Sounds like a reminder to stop using gmail
Great. The corpos are officially fighting. How long until they start assassinating other board members and both all of Cyberpunk and also this WKUK sketch become the standard reality?
So far, they are only assasinating whistleblowers...
Why can't they just check if my MX record goes to Google? Engineers at Amazon are afraid of a little
if .. else ..Good point. But you're thinking like an engineer. If it's true that they nerfed confirmation emails globally to protect their metrics, that's a management or c-suite call.
I doubt that was the main motivation though, more likely they want to encourage clickthroughs into their walled garden. Probably motivated in part by a larger initiative to create more opportunities to expose people to their AI tools
Or they don’t want it to be too obvious what they’re doing.
Maybe their response to the coverage will be that it's meant to protect customer privacy
This has been particularly frustrating for me because I just wrote a nightly script to help me identify Amazon charges in YNAB and I was using the order confirmation emails to do that. I swear like two days into the script working perfectly they stopped including product details.
I would have loved to borrow a copy of this from you. Perhaps there's an API one can use to get their own Amazon purchases? I'll add looking into that to my todo list to get to..eventually
I don't think there is such an API, or at least one that's generally available. I would love to be wrong
Yeah, none that I can see for consumers.
I'm now envisioning some home-baked browser extension that, on transaction purchase, writes the relevant data to a DB or JSON file, which can then be accessed by a process (cron probably?) and use YNAB's API to push the transaction.
Again... one day...
Shouldn't it be relatively trivial to just mimic the API request the Amazon website makes? You can just open the browser dev tools on the order history page and see the request that gets the history.
I've done the same with a different online marketplace and it worked well (although their website was directly returning HTML, which is still perfectly parseable, but I chose to reverse engineer their mobile app instead, which is a bit harder)
cc @goose
It is probably straightforward, but there are plenty of ancillaries you're not going to do with a
curlscript that they could pick up on (like, did your IP pull down the page that's supposed to make this request within a reasonably recent window) and filter on.(You could drive e.g. a Selenium instance, of course, but that's well outside the realm of "simple scripting". Also I think Amazon ships a fair amount of pre-rendered HTML? That's technically an API, but the "A" is a web browser and extracting structured data you care about may not be straightforward.)
The bigger problem is that those internal interfaces are likely to be frightfully unstable. It's not hard to do once, but if you're rewriting it weekly, it rapidly stops being worth the effort.
The last part was an issue before LLM assisted coding, but is a much lesser problem since.
But the other big problem remains - the big guys have many tools to hinder automated scrapping and have much more energy deploying them than you fighting them.
Maybe there's an SAAS for that? Probably hidden behind some of those "search API" offerings.
(Source: daily hobby scrapping of many websites)
Even with LLM assisted coding, I would hate having to waste usage or tokens (and time) every week just trying to fix a scraping script. Not to mention what you already did, which is the anti-scraping tools out there.
It is mildly irritating, and they do have countermeasures for scraping which they actively look for. At very low volume it might be ok, but it quickly becomes very irritating at any kind of scale.
A friend literally mentioned this last night. He ordered a cigar cutter from Amazon (I didn't even know they sold anything related to tobacco/nicotine). And he asked us what category the item was listed as in the email. I joked "circumcision tool." But apparently, I wasn't too far off: It was classified as medical.
I hadn't noticed the change since I've reduced my Amazon buying somewhat.
I wonder if there's some sort of "adversarial categorization". My stud finder was classed as lawn & garden. It's not even a random brand, it's DeWalt. I'm not ordering enough that it makes it hard to tell though, it was my first order in like 6 months.
I had an office chair cover classified as "bedding" and the clip art was a pillow. I thought I had ordered something by mistake until I opened the Amazon order page.
I wonder if it's as simple as going by keywords? I had lock pin tweezers classified as "beauty", presumably because of "tweezers" which would also make sense with "cover".
Amazon’s data model is actually kind of terrible at categorizing stuff or helping you, as a customer, actually find stuff. They seem to rely mostly on search and fuzzy matching, but the way things are categorized in the database is terrible.
Is there a way to just turn these off?
<rant> I actually haven’t bothered to look but 4 emails for one purchase is kinda useless to me, I turn notifications off for every single platform because I want to seek out information that I need on my own in my own time instead of being strung along in 5 different directions with live updates from fkn my whole entire background life </rant>
I'm also considering turning off delivery confirmations altogether. I liked knowing when something was delivered, but now that it doesn't tell me what it is, it's significantly less useful.
Kind of related to your rant: Gmail lets you route emails so you don't get notifications. When you go to the settings, there's a "Filters and Blocked Addresses" section. You can make the filter match a certain from address or string, then set it to
Skip Inbox, orDelete it, depending on what you prefer. The issue is it's not very intuitive IMO. I really would like to switch email providers, but I've had Gmail for over 15 years, so it's difficult to do.I've noticed this more recently, but a lot of services like Paypal or Robinhood send me emails without the option to unsubscribe. I seriously don't need a statement for something I use every few months. It makes me think they intentionally do it so their platform is fresh in my mind.
My inbox its absolutely filled to the brim with random promotions from my utilities, my hsa, my insurance, all my healthcare providers, my university , statements from accounts I haven’t touched in years, and seemingly something from every single website Ive ever friggin visited I swear.
I went to a concert last week and Ticketmaster MADE ME give them my phone number and so Ive had a spam call every hour on the hour all day starting yesterday.
If anyone actually needed to get in touch with me they wouldnt be able to because Im literally ignoring everything.
I use an email forwarding service almost always now. Like for my gym, the address is mygym.39djs@[service.domain], which forwards to my real email business@my.domain. I think I pay €36/year and then, when I'm done with that service, even if just "for now", I just toggle it off. It then just stops forwarding emails it receives. It's brilliant. Hotel loyalty programmes aren't the hassle they used to be - constant drip drips before, now I just turn it on when I make a booking, and off again when I'm back. It's a game changer, for real. I changed maybe 20-30 things manually (utilities, banks etc.), but now I just change email addresses over to it as and when the need arises, to stop it being such a chore. I wish the same were possible for phone numbers where I am. Nobody would have my real number ever again!
Thats way more work than just unsubscribing to everything I can and dumping the rest in “auto delete” folder
Haha, yes I can see why you'd think that. I like it, though, it's very much a once-and-done kind of thing, you know? It also cuts off at the root any account details leaking. Whenever some crappy corpo leaks out my address, I don't even care anymore. Or the shady ones that just ignore the "unsubscribe" process, not a problem. But I like a clean-ish inbox, I got annoyed by the clutter, which is a me problem, I guess.
My main email is leaked all over the web I figure long as no one actually hacks into it I’m alright. Rest be damned.
I'm getting more spam calls lately, too. For me, I think it has something to do with the Framework data breach.
Something also worth doing IMO is finding the unsubscribe link buried at the bottom of emails. In my experience, it actually works for reducing spam (if you're persistent enough).
Tangentially related, a lot of companies offer a way to stop sending you physical junk mail. Sometimes they make you jump through hoops, other times they make you call to remove your address. At my old apartment, I managed to stop basically all junk mail!
Spam phone calls have gotten so bad that basically every phone call gets intercepted by the spam filter now. If you need me and it’s an emergency you better leave me a message or I might not even realize you tried to contact me.
Re: spam calls
I order a VoIP number that I pay maybe a buck or so for every month. All useless phone applications and texts go there. And I usually have it on mute. The text option doesn't work 100% of the time but it's good enough.
My issue is like, I could do that, but I dont want to change my current number and thats the one the whole world has and spam calls
Yeah I’ve give up on managing it and had to create a new email address that I give out for solely inter-personal email.
Is this new, or maybe newly more consistent? Looking through my email archive, I see Amazon confirmation emails as far back as 2019 with minimal detail. Just "Thank you for shopping with us. We’ll send a confirmation when your items ship." with subtotal/total, estimated delivery date, where it's shipping to, and an order number linked to the status page behind a login. There are some mixed in with more detail, some template changes over the years, and some country/region differences.
That said, I'm torn. On the one hand, as a customer I love the convenience of having all of my order info in emails. A single, "unified" place to search for order history across all vendors, no age limitations, no individual logins, no product data changes reflected. On the other, I've seen how information sitting in inboxes or public "secret" unauthenticated order status links can be found and used by bad actors, and so from a security and privacy standpoint I'm happy to see less information in emails.
I'm not sure, because I've definitely received the vague emails, but my latest email confirmation has the full product information available including the name and picture of of the item.
This behaviour seems to be only for the US store, at least for now, as all my Ordered/Dispatched/Out for Delivery updates from EU sites still refer to the specific item in both subject and body of the mails.
Is it just me or is online shopping just stupid these days?
I gave up impulse buying things online quite some time ago and canceled Prime not too long later. Shopping on Amazon now seems even more tumultuous now than it has ever been. Sometimes products don’t seem to actually have descriptions anymore, they just have summaries.
Relying on AI to purchase things for you is frankly the stupidest thing I could possibly imagine. It is counter to the entire point of online shopping - finding the best deals. AI does not know what these products are like. It has not held them in its hands. It doesn’t have human hands to begin with. Shopping is one of the most alien things you could ask it to do. You might as well ask it to evaluate your poetry recital.
But it seems to me that many online stores - Amazon is hardly the only one - aren’t so much in the business of retail as they are in the business of addiction marketing. They may have the things you need, but that’s just the in - it’s there to get you into the ecosystem that gets you addicted to buying cheap tat you don’t need.
Yeah it’s gotten really bad. I’ve started curating specific shops for specific things and the experience is so much better when everything is tailored to the type of shopping you’re doing. You basically can’t serve all needs at once. A website and data model designed to sell pens and stationary needs to make different choices from one selling electronics and camera equipment which makes different choices from one selling cables and home networking.
The examples I put up are all shopfronts that care about selling in the vertical they sell and everything makes sense for what they’re doing. The filter criteria are actually tailored to stuff you might want, the entries for each SKU are descriptive enough to let you make an informed shopping decision, and they don’t inject your queries with dodgy nonsense with brands you don’t know if you can trust.