One of the remedies proposed, tying product reviews to the manufacturer instead of the storefront is a very difficult thing to implement.
Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for example, selling at different prices through certain local distributors.
Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that capture most of the surplus.
This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve, manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme either.
> This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve
Has chosen not to solve. They could trivially improve the situation by ending the practice of commingled inventory so a seller could be held accountable for counterfeit or stolen items but that would cost more so they don’t.
They can definitely solve some problems. There's a number of items that are well known to have common forgeries. Weirdly common is things like Lamy pens[0]. I've gotten legit ones from amazon but seem fake ones.
One big problem I see is if you go to the storefront of some seller there isn't a way to see all their items. I find this baffling, and a clear red flag. Just start clicking on the stores when you're poking around next time. It's very common for things like pet toy sellers or even electronic component retailers. I've seen even certain colors of products be listed on a different page and sold for much cheaper.
There's also the classic example where a page was originally for one product but now has another. You look at the reviews and they're talking about a different product, sometimes related sometimes drastically different. This is actually a great use case for some ML. Flag products if a classifier says the item is significantly different than the previous photos. Could use some basic NLP to check product titles and see if they match. It creates some issues but Amazon has such a big problem that it would be worth it for the customer experience.
But I think the problem is all of this doesn't "make more profits." If it's hard to verify a product a user will spend more time on Amazon. If the idea is that more time increases likelihood of buying more things then a little fraud is good for them. Worse for the customer but better for them. I'm not sure how you solve this problem
Ehhh, My experience is the opposite(perhaps it is what you buy) manufacturers hate dealing with the end customer directly, customer-service is huge pain and not part of their core competence. So the manufacturer always goes through resellers, distributors, middle-men.
Personally I hate it, I would love to buy directly from the manufacturer instead of playing roulette with the distributor.
I'm recently seeing some ads on TV, that make me avoid ads by any means. There simply weirdness and harmfulness to eyes mixed and served. I think this is being done to attract viewer attention, which became 99% of the goal, rather than being informative or signaling. Sometimes there is hardly any indication what the actual product is, and how it is relevant to whatever weirdness that took up most of the ad time. Things like putting a mouth on the forehead of people, fast flickering scenes, and I can't even dare to speak about other weirdness. Oh god, the ad designers are a desperate bunch for attention. I'm really fearful of touching TV remote. And if these ads really liked by people, then I'm fearful of the future of the world in the hands of these people.
"media time" or the amount of time Americans consume media is not rising (6-7 hours a day). So no great new user growth + no great screen time growth. But the Ad industry revenues are growing at 15-20%.
With a population of ~300 Million the US ad industry generates 400 Billion in revenue. Avg Bounty of >1000 bucks a year per person.
The only way to pull that off is to keep injecting more and more ads everywhere and make everything more tempting to watch.
The biggest threat to these companies is if time spent consuming media drops.
I'm pretty quick to never-again a company which advertises in a way that makes me sick. A certain electronics store chain that operates here in the Nordics, which someone is bound to recognise, is on my ban list for psychedelic surrealist shock advertising.
Not that I see much ads any more anyway, what with Ublock Origin, Blokada 5 and Youtube ReVanced.
Totally agree,I think things got incrementally worse after TikTok’s release though. It’s like the content (including ads) is getting so chaotic and overstimulating that I walk away feeling mentally exhausted. All of it is just noise designed to hijack attention for a few seconds.
As a consumer, my reaction to all this is simply to stop looking and stop buying. Unless it's something urgent, I put it on a list and wait. Many times the need goes away. Better than dealing with all this crap.
Regarding the Oatly ad at the top (Another ad for our oat drink providing no reason at all why you should try it), this ad does have a signal. It's a humblebrag. It's saying, our product is so well known, and the reasons for using it so obvious, that we don't need to say anything. It's cementing Oatly brand in the minds of anyone who already thinks that they should be switching to non-dairy milk for any reason (health, environment, etc).
I wish someone did an analysis of their marketing. I really hope it was a huge flop because it’s just awful.
I despise their horrible advertising and marketing copy in general and I sometimes just have to tell myself, “it’s just oat milk no need to boycott it because some edgy marketing consultant forces you to read their nonsense”.
The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days?
My gut suspects not?
Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30% of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then you may as well get the cheapest one
Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
Anchoring still exists and is something people use, price for sure impacts how people view things, if you make 3 price points for your product, say... $20/mth, $200mth and $25000/mth, you can often push people into the middle package more easily, it's called the Goldilocks effect. Pricing and positioning well is a lot of work simply because people for sure still use price as a strange yardstick, and as someone who figures out how to price things and position them for a living, it can be very...frustrating.
If I buy a $100 projector vs a $1,000 one, or a $20 curling iron vs a $200 one, the order of magnitude difference does make for a better product, I find.
A $374 vacuum ranks at #4 while a $1049 vacuum ranks at #8. That is a HUGE price gap for items that are supposed to be of similar quality. The reason for the gap is irrelevant to this discussion too, because we are talking about the relation between price and quality.
And people try to blame the consumer for both sides of the issue.
People shrug and say it is the consumer who demands cheaper products and that is why they are of such low quality (despite what you say, which is that price and quality are much less connected than what people selling you things want you to believe), but then when those same consumers initiate returns, people cry foul like the consumer is somehow maliciously buying shit quality products and returning them to spite honest companies who just want to do right by their customers.
Notice anything in that "Why returns are a big problem" section? A neat rhetorical trick which attempts to get inattentive readers to believe that the bulk of all returns are just people trying on clothes and returning the ones they don't like. Now, if it really were the bulk of all returns, they would have surely mentioned this, because it would buttress their point.
They did not, because they can not, because, I have a suspicion that the $890 billion worth of returns is primarily due to reverse/negative demand for shit products. I suspect those return numbers creeping up year over year are consumers getting annoyed with retailers for not curating products in a way that considers quality and longevity.
As the featured article mentions, Amazon does mark products as frequently returned, but I am not sure it really helps that much.
> Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
And even then, they miss important details, because most reviews only talk about the product in terms of the out-of-box experience. But how good is the product after two years? After four? Even the vacuum review I linked does not really comment on longevity.
> I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
I think it is starting to change where people are getting really tired of shit quality and that is going to continue to be reflected in the returns data. Returns do not make customers whole - they do not get a refund for the time they had to spend researching, procuring, and ultimately returning the product. I imagine companies are going to be in for a rude awakening when they have to reverse course and not only increase quality but also decrease the price because no one wants to spend hard-earned money on expensive junk during a recession.
Not true. There is limited ad space which all advertisers compete for. No matter which model, CPC or CPA, the advertiser who pays most gets the ad placement.
Its similar to SEO. Nobody says "Oh my god, advertising via SEO is free, what a blessing!". It's still a competition. It's still a zero sum game.
He's not saying advertisers don't compete. He's saying it changes from advertising being a massive risk as well as a cost, to just a cost. So the auction is won by the company with the biggest instantaneous profit margin on a SKU, instead of the one with the biggest war chest that can afford to risk on that massive prime time slot. This change in incentive favours shitty products.
Normally in e-commerce, it's based on email or phone number. In physical retail, they use all sorts of tactics, from loyalty cards to facial recognition (where legal, which it shouldn't be).
> "Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products."
The good ol' 7 out of 10 problem. Where the entire lower half of the rating system is unused.
The way I solve it is to have 0 be the middle, If the transaction exceeded expectations you can give it a +1 if it failed to meet them give it a -1 (thumbs up/down if you prefer) you can even throw in a +-2 if you want to allow for more subtlety of expression
There may be something interesting here to think about, but I'd argue that the following statement is literally much more useful than that entire article.
"When advertising, appealing to emotion is much more important than information or logic."
This has little to do with equilibrium analysis, it is just the market for lemons story but for the ad space. You need to investigate the buyers and what they believe about brand quality.
>Ratings compression
Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products.
Last year I was skimming through IKEA furniture and majority of reviews are 4 or 5 stars. And that makes me think that people who don't like IKEA products are either so pissed that they do not want leave 1 star review or IKEA removes bad reviews.
That explains the success of platforms like Temu: every search generates many identical products that are all dirt cheap, which makes my search much easier. I find myself buying a lot faster because there is not a lot of variety and relatively little trickery/ads
I love that this reduces to math a "special theory of enshittification" because it describes how no-name vendors can profit from the "general theory of enshittification" put forth by Doctorow that describes the platform monopolies like Amazon under which the vendors operate.
Reviews are basically useless today. I'm sorry but it is true. Pick any hobby you deeply understand enough to not require handholding by a reviewer, and watch the reviews about that segment. It is a joke, pure PR. "This one is good but this one is pretty gooder" None of these sponsored reviewers want to bite the hand that feeds them and gives them free product to review for their channel. They never go very deep into anything. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia
Customer reviews are also useless. 10 people go 5/5 no comment. One guy goes 3/5 "good thing." ???? Another person didn't hold it right and rated it 1/5, another person got a defective product customer service would have replaced if they had reached out and rated it 1/5.
IMO the solution is doing actual due dilligence. What is the spec sheet? What is actually relevant to what I am doing? How was this thing made? What are the tradeoffs of using this technique in in this product vs other techniques? Where does this featureset stand against other offerings in this segment and pricepoint?
You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the product pages, etc. It also doesn't take longer than you'd spend agonizing over yet another half dozen 20 minute review videos. And you'd end up better informed than most content producers, most customer reviewers, even most redditors on the relevant subreddit.
You operate along these lines and all 5 friction points mentioned in the article become irrelevant. You don't give a shit about the brand, you care about the merits of the component. Prolific advertisement is no longer required as a signal for quality since you are actually evaluating the merits of the component directly and not using proxy signals. Return status also doesn't matter because you are evaluating the merits of the component directly. Ratings don't matter. Pricepoint also doesn't matter because you don't include price in your analysis save for comparing capabilities across a price point vs assuming costly product = better.
And of course maybe you are bad at estimating a components merit. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning Krueger effect. For most things in life this hardly also matters because the effective difference between a most optimal product and one that is merely good enough is basically zero especially when you lack the ability to determine the differences between perfect and good enough (probably means that precision is not required for you use case).
One of the remedies proposed, tying product reviews to the manufacturer instead of the storefront is a very difficult thing to implement.
Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for example, selling at different prices through certain local distributors.
Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that capture most of the surplus.
This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve, manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme either.
> This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve
Has chosen not to solve. They could trivially improve the situation by ending the practice of commingled inventory so a seller could be held accountable for counterfeit or stolen items but that would cost more so they don’t.
They can definitely solve some problems. There's a number of items that are well known to have common forgeries. Weirdly common is things like Lamy pens[0]. I've gotten legit ones from amazon but seem fake ones.
One big problem I see is if you go to the storefront of some seller there isn't a way to see all their items. I find this baffling, and a clear red flag. Just start clicking on the stores when you're poking around next time. It's very common for things like pet toy sellers or even electronic component retailers. I've seen even certain colors of products be listed on a different page and sold for much cheaper.
There's also the classic example where a page was originally for one product but now has another. You look at the reviews and they're talking about a different product, sometimes related sometimes drastically different. This is actually a great use case for some ML. Flag products if a classifier says the item is significantly different than the previous photos. Could use some basic NLP to check product titles and see if they match. It creates some issues but Amazon has such a big problem that it would be worth it for the customer experience.
But I think the problem is all of this doesn't "make more profits." If it's hard to verify a product a user will spend more time on Amazon. If the idea is that more time increases likelihood of buying more things then a little fraud is good for them. Worse for the customer but better for them. I'm not sure how you solve this problem
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/q14p5w/are_la...
Ehhh, My experience is the opposite(perhaps it is what you buy) manufacturers hate dealing with the end customer directly, customer-service is huge pain and not part of their core competence. So the manufacturer always goes through resellers, distributors, middle-men.
Personally I hate it, I would love to buy directly from the manufacturer instead of playing roulette with the distributor.
I'm recently seeing some ads on TV, that make me avoid ads by any means. There simply weirdness and harmfulness to eyes mixed and served. I think this is being done to attract viewer attention, which became 99% of the goal, rather than being informative or signaling. Sometimes there is hardly any indication what the actual product is, and how it is relevant to whatever weirdness that took up most of the ad time. Things like putting a mouth on the forehead of people, fast flickering scenes, and I can't even dare to speak about other weirdness. Oh god, the ad designers are a desperate bunch for attention. I'm really fearful of touching TV remote. And if these ads really liked by people, then I'm fearful of the future of the world in the hands of these people.
"media time" or the amount of time Americans consume media is not rising (6-7 hours a day). So no great new user growth + no great screen time growth. But the Ad industry revenues are growing at 15-20%.
With a population of ~300 Million the US ad industry generates 400 Billion in revenue. Avg Bounty of >1000 bucks a year per person.
The only way to pull that off is to keep injecting more and more ads everywhere and make everything more tempting to watch.
The biggest threat to these companies is if time spent consuming media drops.
I'm pretty quick to never-again a company which advertises in a way that makes me sick. A certain electronics store chain that operates here in the Nordics, which someone is bound to recognise, is on my ban list for psychedelic surrealist shock advertising.
Not that I see much ads any more anyway, what with Ublock Origin, Blokada 5 and Youtube ReVanced.
Totally agree,I think things got incrementally worse after TikTok’s release though. It’s like the content (including ads) is getting so chaotic and overstimulating that I walk away feeling mentally exhausted. All of it is just noise designed to hijack attention for a few seconds.
As a consumer, my reaction to all this is simply to stop looking and stop buying. Unless it's something urgent, I put it on a list and wait. Many times the need goes away. Better than dealing with all this crap.
Regarding the Oatly ad at the top (Another ad for our oat drink providing no reason at all why you should try it), this ad does have a signal. It's a humblebrag. It's saying, our product is so well known, and the reasons for using it so obvious, that we don't need to say anything. It's cementing Oatly brand in the minds of anyone who already thinks that they should be switching to non-dairy milk for any reason (health, environment, etc).
It's I think what we used to call "brand advertising".
Just like random "coca-cola" billboards at the side of a road or a sports stadium
Also that it is the drink of nonconformists and creatives. Many of their other ads cross way over into tryhard cringe for how "random" they are.
It looks like it's in Vienna ("gewista"), but is delivering its huge vacuous message in English.
I wish someone did an analysis of their marketing. I really hope it was a huge flop because it’s just awful.
I despise their horrible advertising and marketing copy in general and I sometimes just have to tell myself, “it’s just oat milk no need to boycott it because some edgy marketing consultant forces you to read their nonsense”.
agree..
The ad is basically saying "You consumers don't know how to use your brains and will buy our brand just because we showed a picture of it". Terrible.
The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days?
My gut suspects not?
Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30% of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then you may as well get the cheapest one
Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
Anchoring still exists and is something people use, price for sure impacts how people view things, if you make 3 price points for your product, say... $20/mth, $200mth and $25000/mth, you can often push people into the middle package more easily, it's called the Goldilocks effect. Pricing and positioning well is a lot of work simply because people for sure still use price as a strange yardstick, and as someone who figures out how to price things and position them for a living, it can be very...frustrating.
If I buy a $100 projector vs a $1,000 one, or a $20 curling iron vs a $200 one, the order of magnitude difference does make for a better product, I find.
> The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days?
> My gut suspects not?
You are correct that price is no longer an indicator of quality.
Look at this stick vacuum review, for example: https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-cordless-vacuums/#1
A $374 vacuum ranks at #4 while a $1049 vacuum ranks at #8. That is a HUGE price gap for items that are supposed to be of similar quality. The reason for the gap is irrelevant to this discussion too, because we are talking about the relation between price and quality.
And people try to blame the consumer for both sides of the issue.
People shrug and say it is the consumer who demands cheaper products and that is why they are of such low quality (despite what you say, which is that price and quality are much less connected than what people selling you things want you to believe), but then when those same consumers initiate returns, people cry foul like the consumer is somehow maliciously buying shit quality products and returning them to spite honest companies who just want to do right by their customers.
Look at how this article is written: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/retail-returns-890-bill...
Notice anything in that "Why returns are a big problem" section? A neat rhetorical trick which attempts to get inattentive readers to believe that the bulk of all returns are just people trying on clothes and returning the ones they don't like. Now, if it really were the bulk of all returns, they would have surely mentioned this, because it would buttress their point.
They did not, because they can not, because, I have a suspicion that the $890 billion worth of returns is primarily due to reverse/negative demand for shit products. I suspect those return numbers creeping up year over year are consumers getting annoyed with retailers for not curating products in a way that considers quality and longevity.
As the featured article mentions, Amazon does mark products as frequently returned, but I am not sure it really helps that much.
> Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
And even then, they miss important details, because most reviews only talk about the product in terms of the out-of-box experience. But how good is the product after two years? After four? Even the vacuum review I linked does not really comment on longevity.
> I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
I think it is starting to change where people are getting really tired of shit quality and that is going to continue to be reflected in the returns data. Returns do not make customers whole - they do not get a refund for the time they had to spend researching, procuring, and ultimately returning the product. I imagine companies are going to be in for a rude awakening when they have to reverse course and not only increase quality but also decrease the price because no one wants to spend hard-earned money on expensive junk during a recession.
Those formulas have to be comedy but it seems like it’s trying to be serious.
agree. they seem hasty but didn't notice anything obviously wrong but may be i missed something ...
Yes. Comedy is suboptimally optimal
Its similar to SEO. Nobody says "Oh my god, advertising via SEO is free, what a blessing!". It's still a competition. It's still a zero sum game.
He's not saying advertisers don't compete. He's saying it changes from advertising being a massive risk as well as a cost, to just a cost. So the auction is won by the company with the biggest instantaneous profit margin on a SKU, instead of the one with the biggest war chest that can afford to risk on that massive prime time slot. This change in incentive favours shitty products.
Since the article doesn’t mention it, CPA stands for cost per action.
Cost Per Acquisition (of a new customer).
How do they know if the customer is new or not?
Normally in e-commerce, it's based on email or phone number. In physical retail, they use all sorts of tactics, from loyalty cards to facial recognition (where legal, which it shouldn't be).
tracking via cookies (that expire after X days) or some kind of identifier in the CRM
> "Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products."
The good ol' 7 out of 10 problem. Where the entire lower half of the rating system is unused.
The way I solve it is to have 0 be the middle, If the transaction exceeded expectations you can give it a +1 if it failed to meet them give it a -1 (thumbs up/down if you prefer) you can even throw in a +-2 if you want to allow for more subtlety of expression
There may be something interesting here to think about, but I'd argue that the following statement is literally much more useful than that entire article.
"When advertising, appealing to emotion is much more important than information or logic."
How can consumers respond to get useful information and enable themselves to make better decisions when exchanging their resources for goods?
- use other information channels like review media (fashion sites)?
- trust secondary sites like brand retailers (IE. John Lewis in the UK?)
????
This has little to do with equilibrium analysis, it is just the market for lemons story but for the ad space. You need to investigate the buyers and what they believe about brand quality.
>Ratings compression Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products.
Last year I was skimming through IKEA furniture and majority of reviews are 4 or 5 stars. And that makes me think that people who don't like IKEA products are either so pissed that they do not want leave 1 star review or IKEA removes bad reviews.
That explains the success of platforms like Temu: every search generates many identical products that are all dirt cheap, which makes my search much easier. I find myself buying a lot faster because there is not a lot of variety and relatively little trickery/ads
I love that this reduces to math a "special theory of enshittification" because it describes how no-name vendors can profit from the "general theory of enshittification" put forth by Doctorow that describes the platform monopolies like Amazon under which the vendors operate.
Reviews are basically useless today. I'm sorry but it is true. Pick any hobby you deeply understand enough to not require handholding by a reviewer, and watch the reviews about that segment. It is a joke, pure PR. "This one is good but this one is pretty gooder" None of these sponsored reviewers want to bite the hand that feeds them and gives them free product to review for their channel. They never go very deep into anything. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia
Customer reviews are also useless. 10 people go 5/5 no comment. One guy goes 3/5 "good thing." ???? Another person didn't hold it right and rated it 1/5, another person got a defective product customer service would have replaced if they had reached out and rated it 1/5.
IMO the solution is doing actual due dilligence. What is the spec sheet? What is actually relevant to what I am doing? How was this thing made? What are the tradeoffs of using this technique in in this product vs other techniques? Where does this featureset stand against other offerings in this segment and pricepoint?
You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the product pages, etc. It also doesn't take longer than you'd spend agonizing over yet another half dozen 20 minute review videos. And you'd end up better informed than most content producers, most customer reviewers, even most redditors on the relevant subreddit.
You operate along these lines and all 5 friction points mentioned in the article become irrelevant. You don't give a shit about the brand, you care about the merits of the component. Prolific advertisement is no longer required as a signal for quality since you are actually evaluating the merits of the component directly and not using proxy signals. Return status also doesn't matter because you are evaluating the merits of the component directly. Ratings don't matter. Pricepoint also doesn't matter because you don't include price in your analysis save for comparing capabilities across a price point vs assuming costly product = better.
And of course maybe you are bad at estimating a components merit. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning Krueger effect. For most things in life this hardly also matters because the effective difference between a most optimal product and one that is merely good enough is basically zero especially when you lack the ability to determine the differences between perfect and good enough (probably means that precision is not required for you use case).
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