
Site Search Could Kill Amazon - AstroChimpHam
https://www.mytotalretail.com/article/how-site-search-could-kill-amazon/
======
jcrawfordor
While I think that they're overdramatizing the problem, perhaps Amazon should
worry about this since I feel like the search is the only way to actually
interact with Amazon. The quality of the metadata they use for browsing by
category and filtering on features is so poor that any way of finding things
on amazon besides search seems just unusable. I regularly "showroom" on other
websites with better product browsing before searching for a specific product
on Amazon to check their pricing.

~~~
jrockway
Yeah, me too actually. Especially when searching for things like PC parts,
Newegg does way better (though PC Part Picker is even better). I feel bad not
buying from the interface that worked best... but Newegg's order process is
pretty evil, so I don't feel that bad. ("Pay $9 to have your order shipped
possibly today, instead of waiting an unspecified amount of time." Do they
still do that? I saw that once and never shopped there again.)

~~~
gav
I call this the "massive heterogeneous catalog" problem.

Generally e-commerce retailers have grown from a fairly narrow set of product
categories (e.g. books for Amazon) to adding more and more diverse categories.
This has a dramatic impact on site search quality.

If you consider a simple example, shoes. You only need a couple of facets to
filter products to a reasonable set to browse through: gender and size. Now
start adding accessories, athletic clothing, and so on, and the results end up
getting harder to navigate with generic search terms like "shoe" giving less
relevant results (not having the context of the user's intent hurts here).

I tried "shoe" on Amazon, got over 400,000 results with the first item being a
shoehorn. It takes a bunch of clicks to deal with that.

This search problem gets worse as catalog sizes grow even bigger. Personalized
results help a lot and Amazon seem to fail me with this, they don't do a good
job bubbling up the products I buy to the top.

It's a hard problem to solve but it's not going to kill Amazon.

~~~
lovesdogsnsnow
Absolutely - this challenge is especially acute for all ecommerce retailers
with broad catalogs. Target, macy’s, walmart, jet, etc all face this
challenge.

Systems like Solr, elastic search and endeca (out of the box) all assume
relevance means keyword frequency in a product page, with some weighting
depending of title, description, tag, etc. Delivering relevant results that
users might want to purchase requires taking these systems, adding or
customizing their NLP techniques, operationalizing historical user search &
purchase data to determine intent, personalizing by shopper history, etc.

The challenges of massive heterogenous catalog affect other areas... Chief
among them search result personalization… an individual’s gaming purchase
history might cause ‘button down’ to return gaming keyboards, rather than
oxford shirts, while a pet products purchase history could lead to a search
for turkey returning turkey dog food.

The fact that Amazon fails to personalize search results is evidence of the
difficulty & opportunity here. The sort of pervasive personalization found in
AirBnb, facebook, google are simply out of reach of most ecommerce retailers…

~~~
gav
> Target, macy’s, walmart, jet, etc all face this challenge.

I've been buying more household items from Jet recently because their smaller
category is easier to navigate. Plus there's no third-party sellers and no
pricing confusion like there is with Amazon vs. Amazon Fresh vs. Amazon
Pantry.

> among them search result personalization

Agree 100%. Retailers need to consider the sometimes overlapping contexts of
browsing history, purchases, and importantly the current browsing session
(with weighting given to cart contents). Somebody currently browsing for food
items should see food items when searching for "turkey", not dog food.

My favorite search example that fails without context is "dress". Does it mean
"dress", "dress socks", or "dress shirts"? Even if it means "dress", are we
talking about women's or girl's dresses?

I did an experiment a few years ago and found that it was possible to improve
search relevancy dramatically by keeping track of items looked at and
purchased, bucketing by category/sub-category, with an exponential decay and
using this to boost popular categories in results. It's terribly low tech, but
it gives a lot better results than no personalization.

There's a bunch of retailers that I visit frequently (and purchase from) that
force me to search, the filter by men's, and do this for _every_ search. It
would be great if they could just learn this coarse-grained level of
personalization.

> The fact that Amazon fails to personalize search results is evidence of the
> difficulty & opportunity here

The opportunity for Amazon is massive. They don't seem to consider my purchase
history at all when ranking products, for example if I search for "olive oil",
the 31st item is the one that I've purchased three times in the last couple of
years and the _only_ olive oil I've purchased.

I've spent a big chunk of the last decade trying to improve ecommerce search
and it's a very neglected area across the board.

------
flareback
I didn't read the whole article. When I got to the page I was presented with a
modal for something I didn't care about. Read the first paragraph scrolled a
tiny bit and another modal popped up so I just closed the page. You know what
kills sites, an annoying user experience.

------
whitepoplar
My dream for an online store is the following:

A magic list that I can add _any_ item to, select a delivery date, and have
the backend automatically fulfill each item, at the cheapest price, on time. I
want to completely abstract away the concept of a store. I want a to-do list
that automatically delivers stuff to me. Additionally, I want a standardized
return policy no matter who fulfills it.

I want to be able to say:

\- (3) Organic Roma tomatoes

\- (6) Sonicare replacement brush heads

\- (1) Patagonia Down Sweater, Black, Medium

\- (1) Bookshelf assembly service, in-home, 3/16/19

and magically have it fulfilled. One could have a slider to make the tradeoff
between speed of fulfillment and cost.

Amazon already sort of does this, but not at the best prices. One would hope
that in the magic to-do list model, local retailers would be able to outbid
non-local retailers, as their shipping costs would be inherently lower.

~~~
bhl
Wait so, you want shoppers to present a purchasing list, and have retailers
compete to fulfill that order? Essentially like an auction with a ceiling?

~~~
whitepoplar
Yes.

------
deanebarker
I feel like the title of this article is way, WAY overblown.

------
tyingq
Not better managing 3rd party sellers is what's going to kill Amazon. It's
pretty common to see orders sit two weeks without shipping, or marked as
"shipped" with no tracking number, or counterfeit items, items different than
what's pictured/described, etc.

Banning the crap sellers would also make search easier. Less duplicate
listings.

~~~
Finnucane
Yes, the biggest threat to Amazon is Amazon. If buying something from Amazon
becomes as much of a crapshoot as buying from eBay, then why bother? St least
if I buy from say, B&H or Elderly, I know I'm going to get the thing I paid
for.

~~~
ktsmith
This is where I'm at. If it doesn't say ships from and sold by Amazon I don't
buy it. This is true on other sites that have integrated third party sellers
as well. It's not worth the shipping delays, possible counterfeits etc.

------
fyrabanks
I'm not sure why I'm replying to click-bait PR, but here it is anyway:

Maybe I'm alone here, but I have an extreme distaste for personalized search
results. I know what I want to see; it's pretty rare search knows what I want
to see when it's trying.

Take the "chips" example from the interview--maybe I'm tired of eating the
same fucking chips every day. Maybe I just want to know what the most popular
options out there are without having to scroll a lot. Not to mention that I
have a preference for Pringles, I'm going to type the brand name into the
search when I want to find it. (If I'm a dog lover, I don't expect Google to
rank dog results first when I type in "animals." I expect information about
animals in general.)

~~~
AstroChimpHam
Founder here. It's a probabilistic problem from the perspective of solving
personalization. If you tend to want something different after trying the same
thing a bunch of times, the algorithm should learn that as well-- that's also
personalization.

There's also been a ton of research done that most consumers do want
personalized experiences, will pay more for them, and will be more likely to
churn if they don't have them. There's a pretty good list at
[https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/18/hyper-personalization-
mar...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/18/hyper-personalization-marketing-to-
a-segment-of-one-vb-live/).

Some examples from that article:

>>> Forrester uncovered the fact that 77 percent of consumers have chosen,
recommended, or even paid more for a brand that provides a personalized
service or experience.

Accenture found that 75 percent of consumers are more likely to buy when you
show you recognize them as an individual and provide recommendations based on
their unique wants and needs.

------
dcole2929
The best way to currently search Amazon is through Google. But if we're being
honest, how many sites can really say that ISN'T the case? Search is hard.
It's a problem that a company with the resources of Amazon should have fixed
but to say it's a potential killer is more than a bit overblown. All the
subpar 3rd party sellers probably have a more significant impact on bottom
line.

------
ztratar
Eli & his team are very smart -- personalized search is incredibly difficult,
and very few people actually do it. But realistically speaking, there's not a
product out there that wouldn't benefit (as long as the price point is ok).

Looking forward to see AI search grow in popularity and become democratized
for developers.

------
mcphage
If site search is something that Amazon does that badly (which they do), then
why would you think that doing it well is the key to beating them? If it's not
_necessary_ to be a sales giant, then why assume it's _sufficient_?

~~~
AstroChimpHam
This is a really fair question. Amazon doesn't do it well, but just about no
one currently does it better. It's like looking at Yahoo or AltaVista before
Google came out and saying they're plenty successful without having incredible
search.

Of course, it's not the same, and retailers need to do a hundred other things
correctly as well, but there is a lot of data to show that people go where the
good search is.

------
FakeComments
The first company to hit viral status with “centaur” shopping models will kill
Amazon the way Amazon killed retail.

~~~
pandler
What are centaur shopping models?

~~~
FakeComments
I guess I as unclear — “centaur” by analogy with centaur chess, which is when
you have an AI and human play together.

A company which faithfully executed an AI for me, eg looking at _every_ pair
of jeans and then using NLP or whatever on the reviews to rank them based on
my shopping history and stated preferences, measurements, etc.

In many ways, sites are already stumbling in this direction: they do analyze
purchases and so forth, but the level of granularity is poor and the control
that the customer has over it is basically non-existent.

But whoever takes the (ironically Amazonian) approach of serving customers
with AI (as opposed to using the same tech for marketing at them) is going to
win, because they’ll have solved the discoverability problem — which plagues
online shopping (and online things generally).

