Monday, 25 May 2009

Amazon can't add - is this the end of internet shopping?

OK, someone explain this one to me...

This is screenshot from Amazon - selling clearance CDs. But, because I'm such a cheapskate, I only wanted to know about the ones that were really cheap, so I changed the list order to 'price: low to high'

Only, what I got was a whole load of jumbled up results, some more expensive, some less than a pound, with no discernible way to tell why - they definitely aren't in price order. High to low behaves better for a while, but then goes screwy too.

It's quite possible that Amazon is using some oddball mechanism, such as price per track or biggest discount, to create the listing. But that's far from obvious if it's true.

Could it be that the public are just too good at finding bargains if they're given the right tools? Is the retail sector undermining our google-given right to find the cheapest anything?

Or has the system just broken? If so, how long will customer confidence in these interfaces endure before we return to the better service of shops and people? ;-)

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