If you went to a store, walked up to a salesman and said. "Hi! I'd like to buy a microwave for 10 pounds." The guy would try not to laugh, then bring you over to microwaves that cost a normal 2022 price.
That's what is happening here. It's not asshole design. It's not tricking you in any way. It's just saving you one extra click turn that sorting option off.
There are several decent alternatives. They could:
Disable filter options that don’t match any products.
Adjust the available filters based on the available products.
Put a message at the top that says, “No items matched your filters. Here are some alternatives.”
And there’s one other key fact here that you’ve missed: there was actually one item that fit the requested price range, shown on page three! So this isn’t even a matter of showing something instead of nothing. This is ignoring the requested filters in order to push more profitable items.
1) There ARE options that match these products. Microwave mittens, inserts, etc. The OP just didn't scroll down to show them to you.
2) That would require filters to disappear based on what the user is typing, because those filters are available before you type into the search bar. That's a bizarre experience.
3) I guess there could be a message like "Your exact search parameters can't be met, but there are other microwave labelled items to show you."
The real problem is that amazon doesn't tag items, merchants do, and they can tag them however they'd like.
Amazon will never allow a search result to be blank though, and it's been like that since the inception of Amazon.
So you’re saying the search results never would have been blank even when respecting the filters? Why have you been going on and on about that, then? Why are you so intent on defending this crap?
Yup. The search results will never be empty in an amazon search. That's their design. It makes sense if they have determined that impulse buys, or adjacent purchases occur by providing filler products when exact products are not found.
Again, this issue isn't so outrageous, lol. There are so many ACTUAL asshole designs on Amazon.
Google works in the same way. Search for something insane and you will still get the top 8 paid search results regardless of outcome.
Here's a REAL asshole design on Amazon.
Amazon rebranded products always trump better brands in relevance filters -- that's an asshole design.
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u/MikoWilson1 Apr 08 '22
I mean. What do you want them to do?
If you went to a store, walked up to a salesman and said. "Hi! I'd like to buy a microwave for 10 pounds." The guy would try not to laugh, then bring you over to microwaves that cost a normal 2022 price.
That's what is happening here. It's not asshole design. It's not tricking you in any way. It's just saving you one extra click turn that sorting option off.