Well that’s the thing… I no longer consider Amazon to be convenient. Low prices be damned, if it takes me hours of clicking around to actually select and purchase the item I want, I’m going to go elsewhere. I’m too lazy, err, “my time is too valuable” to waste on their stupid website. :/
As with all shops they’re fine if you know what you want and how much it costs.
I could not disagree more. I can know exactly what I want, what it’s called, who makes it, and even the part/model number and Amazon will still fail to find it
even if they carry it.
For example, try “Clairefontaine 60g A4”. It’s currently sold out on Amazon UK (as I can verify by copying its ASIN to a URL), but even expressly selecting “include out of stock” won’t find it. Adding the product number (1929C) doesn’t help.
And as I’ve explained above, since their search makes it essentially impossible to successfully filter only to the items that can actually be shipped to Switzerland, even “successful” searches frequently aren’t, in that they are incapable of resulting in a sale.
While I recognize that the different Amazon country sites have differing success rates — the English language ones seem to do better — it’s still appalling how bad their search has become.
Another example: a Rotring 600 0.5mm mechanical pencil. On Amazon UK, entering “Rotring 600 0.5mm” gets two results, right at the top. On Amazon Germany (the preferred Amazon for Switzerland), and the country where the damned thing is made, the same search finds all manner of Rotring 600 products, but with useless item titles that don’t include the lead thickness, so I have to click every damned one and scroll into the weeds to find what thickness it is. The search is doubly sucky because when set to German, it struggles with German compound nouns, so fails to find things and instead proposes all manner of crap. And when set to English, it doesn’t use the native English product databases from the US and UK, but instead machine translates the English into German, and then feeds that into the lousy German search. It’s a joke.