I was looking for a midi skirt with pockets on Amazon. That’s a search with three parts: it must be a skirt, it must be mid length, and it must have pockets. There were 60 garments returned from this search, and how many of them were midi skirts with pockets? Two. Just 2 out of 60.
There were more ankle length dresses without pockets than what I asked for. It’s not that this is such an obscure item of clothing that Amazon doesn’t have. If you dig through enough pages you can find what you’re looking for. But in general, their search engine is shit.
Do they think that although I searched for midi skirts with pockets, what I really want are shorts (without pockets)? If so, I would be in luck because there are more of those results than what I asked for.
And so are the rest of the returns, even if they’re not labeled as “sponsored”.
Amazon doesn’t want precision shopping. They want to offer all kinds of stuff peripherally related to your search and hope you have poor impulse control.
An interesting check would be to see if Google does any better. If not, that might point to it just being a challenging AI task when product descriptions are not in any consistent format. If Google does better, that might imply that Amazon has (counterintuitively) discovered that if you’re already on the Amazon site the probability of making a sale is not increased by making this type of focused search hyper-efficient, and that throwing up a bunch of similar things that people may not realize that they wanted is more likely to lead to a sale.
In a few years, we’ll all let our totally not evil AI overlords at Amazon and Google dress us and feed us and keep us warm and sometimes buy us nice things as a treat.
One thing I can tell you as an objective fact is that Amazon’s AI tech is superb if the metric is “will you buy stuff”. So whatever’s happening here, it’s probably not because they are dumb. The AI-driven “Recommended For You” etc stuff generates 35% of sales.
A few years back Amazon employed a pop-up that asked if you had any suggestions for improving their search function. I know little about search engines, but have had some success with Craigslist searches, because you’re allowed to exclude descriptive terms.
So, if I’m looking for a window, I’ll exclude Auto, Wheel, Computer, and maybe a dozen other words. It would refine the results well.
I suggested the exclusion feature on the Amazon pop-up, because I figured that most sellers stuffed hundreds of bullshit keywords into their product descriptions — if you’re selling boots, why not try to show up in searches for sandals, socks, rain gear, camping equipment, etc. etc.
I also figured Amazon would never implement such a change because they would have to scrub every product description in their inventory. However, eventually it could be an immediately effective whip to punish the use of bogus keywords.
I think you’re doing something wrong. I just typed your exact search term into the Amazon search bar and the results were 70 midi skirts with pockets, and one dubious ad for a women’s clothing company that probably sells midi skirts with pockets and five “Trending Styles” suggestions that consisted of maxi skirts and such.
Same here. I just did the exact same search (midi skirt with pockets) and got 50+ results on the first page that were all listed as being midi skirts with pockets. I didn’t click on any to view in detail but all the images looked exactly like what you were looking for so, I am not sure what the OP did wrong to get different results.
And as we speak, a sweatshop in rural India receives an instruction to ramp up production of midi skirts with pockets in anticipation of demand for this newly trending fashion craze.
I can’t speak for “targeted search results”, but I can say, the more terms I add to my search, the more results I get, not less, For this example if I start out with “pocket skirts” I’ll get say 50 matches. Add “midi” and now I get 100, not 25.
I agree their search is so shitty. I routinely search Amazon for a specific product, spend several minutes trying different things, no luck, not there.
I go to google, same exact search, very first result is a link to it on Amazon! WTF?
Happens all the time, I swear.
If I search for 2” nails, I still have to double check because MOST of the results are NOT 2” nails, they are some other length. How hard is it to get that one detail right?
Sometimes the extra stuff they offer has a variety of styles listed in the individual items description. It takes extra time to look at each one, but I have no life so it’s a hobby of mine.
I get the same crap when I search-- unless I check “prime only.”
Then I check “prices: low to high.”
This eliminates the people who have a 50 cent skirt for $20 shipping-- those are frequently sponsored ads and come up with practically any clothing search, no matter what type of garment you search for.
The “prices: low to high,” also gets rid of sponsored ads, because it gets rid of all the high-priced stuff that has to be sponsored, since few people would ever see it if it came 50 pages after the $20 skirts.
This does mean that even if you don’t have prime, you have to page through lots of cheap stuff that ships prime, and the try-it-before-you-buy-it stuff.
But no mini skirts with 0 pockets. Or maternity pants, that actually do have pockets (!!); never did figure that out.
I find that low-to-high still includes sponsored stuff. I can tell by the fact that there will be more expensive stuff first, before it actually gets to the lowest price item.
Yesterday I was searching for Ecoflow battery backup. I typed ‘ecoflow battery’, and not a single thing in the list was an Ecoflow. It took until page three to find a single one, and it was one that was out of stock. All the rest were Chinese knock-off batteries.
Over on the left panel was the selection for ‘manufacturer’, and ecoflow was there. So, I clicked that. And the list returned still only had the same out-of-stock battery and a whole lot of Chinese knock-offs. What good is a manufacturer filter if it doesn’t filter by manufacturer?
Going to the battery section by navigation, there were humerous ecoflow models available and in stock. You apparently just can’t search for them.
I think what’s going on is heavy SEO manipulation by large vendors, and Amazon doesn’t care because they get a sale and because they don’t want to piss off large vendors. If you look at the extended descriotion for a lot of products, they intentionally put in all sorts of unrelated keywords to maximize the humber of times their product makes it into search results. So a pair of women’s dress pants will have keywords like “Women, Men, shorts, pants, clothing, sports, tops, underwear, jeans, office, shoes, fomal, informal…”
This may be a profitable short-term strategy, but over the long run it’s going to make Amazon vulnerable to competitors.
You are surely right that they are optimizing sales.
But I’m also 100% certain that they are including the “annoyed customer shops elsewhere” effect into the optimization.
Although occasionally I’ve had strange difficulty finding stuff on Amazon, I certainly don’t think of it generally as the place that has a lot of stuff but is hard to search. I think of it as the place that has almost everything, is quick convenient reliable and trustworthy. So I don’t think their optimization is too far off.
OP: Try searching at eBay. Since you probably want new clothes you can check the New condition box on the left hand side. I find searching at eBay much more useful than searching at Amazon.
I hate searching for clothes on the internet in general. In itself, I consider searching inside Amazon just as bad. They don’t even seem to look for complete matches. If I were to type “plus size skirt” I’m going to get everything plus size, skirt or no, and usually the crappiest clothing outlets come up first. Once I find a vendor I like, I go back to them again and again to be sure that I’m getting the quality I want. Good luck.
