What's the most painful thing about online shopping?

I believe Shopping search will be revolutionized with language models just like general search

Amazon deliberately broke their search several times, one used to be able to simply sort searches or categories by the most popular, but that got replaced by "featured" several years ago.

Lately it's at least half "sponsored" results.

Obviously faked reviews is my pet peeve. It's irritating that Amazon can't figure out how to spot and remove these, or at least offer a "report this" button. Even when the review is obviously for an entirely different product.

search has always been a peeve of mine, too. then i had to work on a self-hosted magento project and saw how resource expensive search is compared to everything else.

so tired of hearing about amazon, though. it's like we've got a new demographic of people who are incapable of going to best buy or target without turning it into some "fight the power" internet activism.

> What's the most painful thing about online shopping?

1) broken search (as in returns everything except the thing I am looking for);

1a) search that does not index model/product numbers -- if I have obtained a model/product number from somewhere (say a review), I want that exact item to come up via a search on that model/product number;

2) sites that hide shipping and handling charges until after they want my credit card info (for me, this is an immediate abandoned cart);

3) sites that don't provide any sizing/measurements, or just as bad, provide "dimensionless" numbers (i.e.: Measurements: 12" x 6" x 3" -- is that length, width, height, or width, length, height, or height, width, length?). Sometimes one can workout which is likely which, but sometimes, esp. for near cubic items, it is impossible to reason out which is which. Special points to the few sites that not only label the measurements (12" L x 6" W) but also provide an image diagram of what they consider length vs width vs height.

The most painful thing I've encountered is having to register on multiple different e-commerce stores and fill in all my personal info again. Most consumers don't want an account, and most merchants allow you to buy without registering an account, but some don't do this and you have to jump through hoops just to buy something (filling address, e-mail, phone number, and confirming e-mail, etc). It adds too much friction, which is why people prefer Amazon. All their details are pre-filled and third-party merchants just grab those details for orders.

A well-known issue on Amazon is the reviews being for the wrong products.

Shitty companies sell some cheap widget and gain some good reviews (and whether those are genuine or not is a big question too).

Then they change the product profile for a completely different product, but retain the positive reviews.

If you don't look carefully, you won't notice that a high review score is for a cheap toothbrush, not the expensive flashlight you're trying to get.

I don't have any problems except for wanting more options for picking a delivery date. Sometimes I don't want all the boxes to arrive at the same day and I don't want to have to put off buying something to the next day in hopes that my delivery options let me pick an entirely different set of days.

Searching works fine. I don't give a fuck about reviews because nobody ever knows what they're actually talking about.

Clothing that doesn't fit.

Clothing that doesn't have a pleasant texture. (feels like coarse cloth, rather than smooth, like silk)

Clothing that is made of the wrong materials. (looks like cotton, but actually polyester or nylon.)