Amazon is one of the best eCommerce platforms thanks to its wide range of online sellers and items on the platform. While Amazon may be filled with all your favorite products, its extensive inventory makes it difficult to find what you're looking for. Therefore, Amazon allows buyers to use the search bar to conduct a product search and find the products they want.
While this should be a simple process of entering a few words into the Amazon search box, Amazon search is so bad, making it more frustrating for customers to search and find their desired products. But why is Amazon's search so bad? And how can you find exactly what you want on Amazon? Let's look at why Amazon search is so bad and how you can search for specific items or products.
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Why is Amazon Search So Bad?
Amazon search is bad because Amazon focuses on showing paid ads to its customers. These are items that Amazon earns the most profit from. Therefore, when you search on Amazon, your search results will have tons of irrelevant sponsored products making it difficult to find a specific item. Amazon will push aside the less lucrative listings and place paid ads at the top of your search results.
An Amazon search will also yield inaccurate results due to products having inaccurate descriptions, making it difficult for the Amazon search engine to relate them to the user's query.
Why Can't I Find Products When I Search on Amazon?
When you search for a product, Amazon will show you the sponsored items before the other items. This is because Amazon aims to make huge profits from sponsored ads. Therefore, it clutters search results with paid ads to direct customers to products that might interest them.
Usually, these sponsored products are not related to what you're looking for but rather based on your previous searches or purchases. Amazon will bury relevant items and randomly place sponsored products making it difficult to find a specific product.
Another reason could be that Amazon sellers are not putting the right information in their product descriptions. When sellers fail to provide the right keywords and relevant information, Amazon's search engine may fail to detect the product making it less likely to appear in search results.
How to Find Exactly What You Want on Amazon?
Rather than performing a general search on Amazon, which could retrieve many irrelevant results, you can narrow down your search. This will help you find exactly what you're looking for quickly and easily. You can perform a more specific search by
Perform an Amazon Advanced Search
Rather than performing a simple search, you can do an advanced search to narrow down your searches. Amazon Advanced Search is a search engine that allows you to get better results. This involves providing more information so that your search results will be filtered further.
Unfortunately, Amazon Advanced Search is not available in all departments. It can be used when looking for books, music, DVDs, and video games. You can go to any of these departments and look for Advanced Search in the navigation bar at the top-left of your screen.
When looking for items like books, the advanced search option allows you to narrow down your search based on titles, keywords, authors, ISBNs, and other more detailed information. This makes it the most effective way of searching for products on Amazon.
Use Filters to Narrow Down Your Search
You can use the Amazon filtering system to narrow your search to specific items. However, before using this approach, it's best to know the brand or company of the specific item you're looking for.
After you search for an item on Amazon, the left-hand menu has ways you can refine your search. The filters will vary depending on the product you searched for. You can significantly narrow down your search by combining as many filters as possible.
Alternatively, you can search by department rather than the Amazon search bar. This prevents items with similar names but under different categories from appearing in your search.
Sort Your Search Results
You can also use the sorting option to make your search more specific. This is usually helpful when looking for items within a certain price range. For example, if you're looking for the cheapest item, you can sort your search results from the cheapest to the most expensive. To sort your search results:
- Click on the dropdown menu at the top right labeled Sort ByYou'll have various options depending on your needs. You can select Price: Low to High to see the cheapest item first.
- If you prefer seeing the most expensive items first, click on Price: High to Low.
You can also use the other options, including relevance, or average review score, to sort your search results accordingly.
Find Items From A Specific Seller
If you prefer buying products sold by a specific seller, you can filter the products based on who is selling them. To do this
- In the left-hand menu of your search results page, under the Seller option, you'll find a list of sellers selling the item you searched for.
- Click on the person or company to only see products sold by them. You can select as many sellers as you want.
- If you cannot find your preferred seller, click on See More to see other sellers.
How Sellers Can Improve Amazon Search?
There are also a few ways sellers can improve the Amazon search feature by ensuring that their products appear in search results. These include:
- Improving their product's description: Products should have detailed and accurate descriptions so that the Amazon search engine can have enough information to show the product on search results.
- Seller performance measurements: When sellers have a higher ranking, their products are more likely to appear on search results. Therefore, sellers should exceed Amazon standards to make their products visible to customers.
- Amazon guidelines: Sellers should also adhere to Amazon's guidelines to have their products at the top of search results.
While Amazon search performs poorly, sellers should also help the Amazon search engine understand their products to place them on users' search results correctly.
Conclusion
Located at the top of the Amazon website, the Amazon search bar is supposed to help you quickly find an item you want to buy. However, a simple search may not give you the results you want.
This is because Amazon clutters your search results with sponsored items that may be unrelated to what you want. Fortunately, you can use Amazon's Advanced Search, filtering and sorting options, or search suggestions to save yourself the time of finding exactly what you need.