Thursday, May 03, 2018

Listing Pollution is Getting Worse

About a year and a half ago, I noted and complained about it as practiced on eBay. I even put up a petition asking eBay to crack down on the practice. It got a whopping 15 signatures.

A year and a half later, listing pollution is more widespread and far worse. Shopping for clothing items on Amazon is far more annoying than it should be, and takes far longer because now most stuff seems to be priced "from" $X.

For example, in search results, a pair of "brown dress shoes for men" is listed as "from $13.99." What does "from" mean? When you click through, you probably learn that if you want the shoes in size Triple Extra Small Narrow, and in Puke Green with Meat-Colored Flecks, yes, they are $13.99. But if you want them in any normal size and/or in any normal color scheme, they're $27.99.

Question #1: If I'm not willing to pay $27.99 for the shoes if that's what they're advertised at, why the hell would I be willing to pay $27.99 for them after Amazon wasted my time and pissed me off by trying to trick me into thinking they would be $13.99 or something close to that?

Question #2: If I ask the search results to show me only items that are eligible for Amazon Prime (i.e. free two-day delivery), and they show me a result with the little Prime logo next to it, isn't it reasonable to expect that when I click through I will not see "not eligible for Amazon Prime" and a minimum delivery wait of three weeks under every size and color option I click on? I pay good money for Amazon Prime, and while I don't expect every item on the site to be Prime eligible, I do expect items that Amazon tells me are Prime eligible to actually be Prime eligible.

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