
Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work? - MagicClam
http://jackg.org/amazon-price-sort
======
woj
I don't work at Amazon but worked at one of the largest comparison shopping
sites in a core search group.

Sorting by price is hard - if you really wanted to do a true price sort you
end up with the long tail of products that match the term "ipod" (but are very
loosely related to ipods) at the top of search results. Try searching for ipod
in electronics and sorting by price.:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3Aipod%2C...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3Aipod%2Ci%3Aelectronics&keywords=ipod&ie=UTF8&qid=1337231072#/ref=sr_st?keywords=ipod&qid=1337231088&rh=k%3Aipod%2Cn%3A172282&sort=price)

I get a usb connector, stereo speaker, some other mp3 players, etc. all among
the top 6 results. Only 2 ipods on the first page. At least there is a link to
a department containing just the ipods.

So in order to avoid doing really badly you don't allow searching by pure
price, but rather use a combination of price and relevancy (and this can only
take you so far as the results above demonstrate.)

~~~
gcb
There's no excuse like that for Amazon.

Ideally, you would click electronics category. Apple. IPod. Order by price.
You didn't select category iPod accessories, so you shouldn't see them there

But some slob at Amazon sacrificed search by adding related crap

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bobduke
This is one of the few annoyances of shopping at Amazon. As a Prime user, I
usually don't want to deal with anyone other than Amazon directly.

There's a search filter option to select "Prime eligible" items, but when you
select it, the price sorting still seems to include Marketplace vendors.
Selecting the "New" search filter does not help.

There's even a search filter for "Seller" that allows you to select only
amazon.com, but the price sort is still wrong if this is selected!

(I understand that Amazon probably prefers that we stumble upon the
marketplace vendors, but it's frustrating when you can't disable it even
temporarily.)

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georgemcbay
Good question. Amazon is great for searching, pretty good for browsing, but
pretty awful for browse-searching, where you're trying to narrow down results
via search but still browse through them using various sorting and filtering
types. The consistently awful price handling is the worst part of it.

I often find myself doing product filtering on other sites (yes, I feel a bit
bad about this) and then (usually) buying on Amazon because of price and the
free Prime shipping.

eg. I'll figure out what I want to buy for a new computer system on Newegg,
because their combined browse-search is way better than Amazon's, and then
take the final result and see if it is worth buying on Amazon via a direct
parts name/number search. Amazon loses about 10-20% of the sales I would have
otherwise just given them due to this when it turns out the cost to buy the
item on the other site I was using is similar enough to the Amazon price. When
the price is even close I favor the other site since they provided me a better
UX experience, but I do admit that if the overall cost to buy on Amazon is
significantly cheaper, I'll still buy from them.

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r00fus
Anytime you see something that's relatively easy to solve by a major company
but remains unsolved, either you don't realize how hard the problem really is,
or the company is profiting from their "oversight". Apple could easily make a
2-disk-drive macbook, but they don't sell that configuration.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
I'm not so sure in the case of Amazon. Their requirements analysis process
appears immune to customer feedback.

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DenisM
That was bothering me for ages. I wish someone from Amazon came out to explain
what' really going on with broken sort.

~~~
FaceKicker
I never really use sort by price because I find that the cheapest results are
usually not very relevant, but I do have other complaints about sorting
results on Amazon...

Why do I still need to select a department in order to sort? Does Amazon
really not have the resources to index their entire product database (or at
the very least just pick the department with the most results to save me a
click)? And why can I only sporadically sort by bestselling/most popular?

~~~
AndrewNoNumbers
_I never really use sort by price because I find that the cheapest results are
usually not very relevant_

That's exactly part of the problem. If I'm searching for something specific
like 'iPod Touch 32GB' I should not get results for $0.99 iPod cables and
cases.

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chime
I wrote about this recently too, with some screenshots:
<http://chir.ag/201203161607>

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shadowswimer
What I don't get is when I search for any product then select to filter by
"Amazon Prime" I am still seeing results for items that are not Prime
Eligible. Now you can't tell me that Amazon doesn't know whether or not they
are fulfilling a certain product. I mean if they are able to display the Prime
logo on the products page why can't they filter for only Prime Eligible items?

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nazgulnarsil
It works better with the prime only option selected, removing a major
variable. I might wind up paying more for certain items, I don't care. I don't
actually need the best item with the most features for the lowest price. The
idea that I do is an artifact of incorrect cost/benefit analysis about the
value of my time and mental effort.

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caladri
At one point it seemed to me that the prices were sorted by the listed retail
price for that particular item, and not the lowest offered price for it, or
something along those lines. It's been years since I formed that wild guess,
though. But it has seemed to roughly hold up when I'm (foolishly) trying to
price-shop on Amazon.

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buss
Ex-Amazon engineer here. I worked on the smart refinements team, which shows
relevant categories and refinements on the left hand side of the search and
browse pages.

Broken price sort is a common complaint both inside and outside of Amazon.
There have been email threads, tickets, and half working solutions to this but
nothing -- so far -- has worked well enough.

First of all, no engineer at Amazon would tell you that the current state of
price sort is acceptable. It is a well known problem that gets worked on from
time to time (In fact, better price sort was going to be my next project
before I left so, uh, sorry Internet...). The current price sort has been
around for a long time and nothing has outperformed it.

Amazon can't sort by price well for several reasons.

1\. What do you mean by price?

2\. Low cost accessories

3\. Bad item classification

4\. More things that I can't get into

1\. Price is hard to figure out. Do you want to sort by the base price of an
item, the price plus shipping (which depends on where you live), or the price
after discounts or specials? What about products that are sold both by Amazon
and third party sellers, where the 3p seller charges less for the item but
more for shipping than Amazon? Which price should be shown?

2\. Low cost accessories dominate searches for a product. If you search for
"iPod" in all-products search (APS, the default search on the front page) then
you get pretty relevant results that span a few categories. To sort those you
first need to select a category (we'll get to that later) and then sort by
price. If you select electronics you'll see a few relevant results and a ton
of accessories.

You could argue that Amazon should have better algorithms (and that's probably
true), but there's only so much you can do. If you _really_ want to sort by
price then you shouldn't care about the relevancy of the results. To argue
otherwise means that you won't have results that are increasing in price as
you scroll down. You'll see more relevant but more expensive results at the
front.

3\. Both 3p and internal item-to-category classification continues to be a
struggle at Amazon. I knew several people on the team that helped improve item
classification while I was there and they did great work and made huge
improvements to the catalog accuracy. Amazon has systems that learn the
correct classification and suggest the correct categories to 3p sellers.
Unfortunately, you'll still find sofas in the electronics category. This
really screws up the results. Your outs are only as good as your ins.

4\. There are some fundamental design choices that make solving this issue
really hard. I obviously can't go into such fine detail, but try to appreciate
that really smart people are working really hard so you can buy the lowest
priced product as easily as possible.

In direct response to the article:

> Why would Amazon fail badly at something that seems so simple? The immediate
> cause is probably caching. Amazon likely has a task that periodically caches
> the low price for each item.

Well, caching is used extensively, but this probably isn't why the results
look like they do. See #1.

> Tellingly, if you search for items without many Marketplace listings, the
> price sort is much more reliable.

Again, that's because if you exclude marketplace sellers the price is easier
to calculate.

> Perhaps they can stop trying; why not just exclude Marketplace items from
> the price sort calculation altogether?

Seriously? Exclude a huge portion of all the products sold on Amazon? Crazy.

Price sort is hard. Just sort by popularity.

~~~
laughinghan
I think your points 2-4 all make sense, however:

    
    
        1. What do you mean by price?
        1. Price is hard to figure out. Do you want to sort by the
        base price of an item, the price plus shipping (which
        depends on where you live), or the price after discounts
        or specials? What about products that are sold both by
        Amazon and third party sellers, where the 3p seller
        charges less for the item but more for shipping than
        Amazon? Which price should be shown?
    

What possible reason would we have to care about the "base" price before
shipping, discounts, or specials? When I say sort by price, I mean sort by how
much money my bank account decreases by, and I think Amazon _already knows
this_ , because when you look at "New" or "Used", it sorts by base
price+shipping, just like it should.

That being said, the other 3 reasons sound intractable, and are exactly the
reasons I would have guessed.

~~~
davezatch
Except that shipping is not necessarily obvious. There are several options
(overnight, 2 day, longer) with different price points. Also, if you're a
Prime member you get free 2 day shipping, but what if I'm prime but not logged
in/using a different machine?

And setting a default shipping cost is likely to further confuse customers.
E.g. if you show the cheapest option always, there will be a price bump at
checkout, but you don't want to show expensive option by default because it
raises all perceived prices.

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gcb
It's only bad because they are lazy greedy slobs.

It's the easiest problem to solve. Just remove bad categorization.

Open Amazon, click any category. Let's say hdmi cables. What do you see?
Probably televisions, screws, microwave ovens, inflatable sex dolls, anything!

They let bad Sellers fill their categories with crap. Now you can't search.

And that's some kind of difficult problem to solve? Give me a break.

~~~
cdcarter
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_4?rh=n%3A172282%...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_4?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A%21493964%2Cn%3A281407%2Cn%3A172532%2Cn%3A172540%2Cn%3A464418%2Cn%3A202505011&bbn=464418&sort=popularity-
rank&ie=UTF8&qid=1337233121&rnid=464418)

Oh yea?

~~~
rhizome
Sort by price "high to low" and tell us if you see anything that doesn't look
like an HDMI cable.

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mthreat
They probably found that it increased sales by 0.7%.

~~~
walrusgoatman
They found that quasi-random ordering increased sales? That seems odd. What
algorithm do you suppose they're using to order results? Random number
generator?

~~~
Danieru
If anyone in the existence of the Internet was best suited to experiment with
sorting, it would be amazon. A 1% improvement for amazon pays for a department
of engineers.

A department of engineers that can experiment with advanced search.

In the article's example, 'ipod', I think amazon's strategy is clear. They are
sorting lowest to highest of what they think you might mean by 'ipod'. Does
the user mean 'ipod [touch]'? 'ipod [nano]'? Or maybe 'ipod [accessory]'?

If they did the 'proper' substring based search to create a set which was then
ordered by price you would only see ipod accessories for the first 100 pages.
Which would be prefect if 100% of people who searched 'ipod' only wanted
accessories. Which is not the case.

So amazon is 'cheating' to show users what want to increase sales, even if it
drives us engineers up the wall.

Patio11 would be proud.

