Tag: amazon

Shorts

So I’ve been trying to overcome my self-imposed taboos on online shopping, and trying to buy things online, especially brands and sizes that I already know and items that offline shops don’t stock much of.

As the title of this post might suggest to you I’m trying to buy shorts. I’ve had to decommission several pairs over the last couple of years for a number of reasons – some became too loose, some too tight, others wore out, more are fading away. And the lack of inventory of shorts in my wardrobe means that I end up wearing this one red pair pretty much everywhere.

While the beauty of online shopping is supposed to be that you get massive variety, and the long tail can get served, the problem is that the way sites are designed makes it hard to discover them. Here are two images, one each from Amazon and Jabong.

So I have two basic problems with the shorts that are available for sale online, based on these two sites.

  1. Too long: Check out the Jabong picture here. First of all, Jabong groups shorts and “3/4ths” (when did those abominations even become a thing) in the same category. But they are nice and allow you to specify length. I said “thigh length” and this is what they show me:
    Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 6.25.31 AM
    I mean, shorts by definition are supposed to be short right? I grew up in an era when Pete Sampras was bossing Wimbledon and shorts of this length were classified as “bermudas”. If you look at the image above, save a couple of “sports shorts” (it’s sad that Jabong doesn’t even allow me to filter those out, since I’m not looking for them), they’re all knee length! Which is too long for a pair of shorts!
  2. Too narrow: Jabong refuses to admit that there is something called “relaxed fit” (even for cargos). Amazon has no fit filters for shorts. And the shorts all look like they’re just truncated pants rather than shorts. The difference between shorts and pants (apart from the extent of leg they cover of course) is that while the latter are narrow, shorts are more relaxed, and shouldn’t stick to your leg! And this is what Amazon shows me (while Amazon has a separate sportswear section, it continues to show sports shorts along with the regular shorts. They even showed boxers. There is no option to specify I want the button-zip-belt kind of “casual wear” shorts):

Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 6.36.03 AM

All of them are way too narrow! Of the radius where they get stuck to the thigh when you sit down leaving you with the potential embarrassment of pulling them down when you get up.

I had ranted during an earlier attempt to buy online about the difficulty of sorting through inventories so I won’t go into that here.

All I have to say here is that it seems like “shorts” don’t mean what they used to, and I’m extremely unhappy about it.

Selection bias and recommendation systems

Yesterday I was watching a video on youtube, and at the end of it it recommended another (the “top recommendation” at that point in time). This video floored me – it was a superb rendition of Endaro Mahaanubhaavulu by Mandolin U Shrinivas. Listen and enjoy as you read the rest of the post.

I was immediately bowled over by youtube’s recommendation system. I had searched for both Shrinivas and Endaro … in the not-so-distant past so Youtube had put two and two together and served me up an awesome rendition! I was so happy that I went to town twitter about it.

It was then that I realised that this was the firs time ever that I had noticed the top recommendation of Youtube. In other words, every time I use youtube, it recommends a video to me, but I seldom notice it. And I seldom notice it for a reason – they’re usually irrelevant and crap. The one time I like the video it throws up, though, I feel really happy and go gaga over the algorithm!

In other words, there’s a bias which I don’t know what its exactly called – the bias that when event happens in a certain direction, you tend to notice it and give credit where you think it’s due. And when it doesn’t happen that way, you simply ignore it!

In terms of larger implications, this is similar to how legends such as “lucky shirts” are born. When something spectacular happens, you notice everything that is associated with that spectacular event and give credit where you think it’s due (lucky shirt, lucky pen, etc.). But when things don’t go your way you think it’s despite the lucky shirt, not because the shirt has become unlucky.

It’s the same thing with belief in “god”. When you pray and something good happens to you after that, you believe that your prayers have been answered. However, when you pray and something good doesn’t happen, you ignore the fact that you prayed.

Coming back to recommendation systems such as Youtube’s, the problem is that it is impossible for a recommendation system to get recommendations right all the time. There will be times when you get it wrong. In fact, going by my personal experience with Youtube, Amazon, etc. most of the time you will get your recommendation wrong.

The key to building a recommendation system, thus, is to build it such that you maximise the chances of getting it right. Going one step further I can say that you should maximise the chances of getting it spectacularly right, in which case the customer will notice and give you credit for understanding her. Getting it “partly right” most of the time is not enough to catch the customer’s attention.

Putting marketing jargon on it, what you should focus on is delighting the customer some of the time rather than keeping her merely happy most of the time!

Blossom, not babykutty

I wouldn’t be wrong in saying that most of the books I own have been bought at Blossom, the new and secondhand bookstore on Church Street, Bangalore. I have bought significantly from Premier Bookshop also, but there was an inflexion point in my reading after Premier closed, so most of my book-buying has happened after that. I have bought some books from larger stores such as Landmark or Crossword, but they are too few to be counted. In fact, I would hate to classify Landmark or Crossword as “bookstores” any more, given the amount of real estate they allocate for that trade.

So I was at Blossom last month, browsing its shelves. The Karnataka Quiz Association still gives out its prizes in the form of Blossom coupons, and since I still have a few unspent coupons, I was at the store looking if there was a book I liked. And possibly for the first time ever in that store, I was underwhelmed.

Essentially my book buying and reading habits have changed significantly in the last two years (my last “raid” on Blossoms was in September 2011). Sometime in 2012 i got myself a Kindle. While I initially used it to read PDFs and free e-books and instapaper, I soon warmed up to buying books directly from the Kindle store. The gamechanger as far as I was concerned was the free samples. You can download free samples of any e-book on your Kindle, and once you’ve read the sample (typically about 7% of the book) you can purchase the book with a single click (from your Kindle itself). Some of the books which I’ve wanted to explore have had me so hooked that I’ve ended up buying. And now (partly as a result of a weak ligament in my left thumb) I find it hard to read physical books!

The primary reason I felt underwhelmed at Blossom was that my process for book-discovery has also changed, along with my process for book buying. One of the advantages buying regularly from Amazon is that their recommendation engines start working for you. So nowadays, if I want to browse books, i go to the Amazon website and start looking through my recommendations. And so far, I’ve bought a few of my recommended books and have ended up liking them.

Being a regular visitor to the Amazon recommendations page means that I’m clued in to the long tail of books, which would happen earlier only when i visited special bookshops such as Blossom. Also, the breadth of Amazon’s collection means that I’m more likely to find a title I like on the Kindle Store than in a bookshop like Blossom. And add to this my preference for ebooks over physical books and you know why Blossom doesn’t pleasure me any more.

So every time I would look through the shelves on the third floor of the store (the non-fiction section housing secondhand books) and find something interesting, I would find myself reaching for my phone and checking if the book were available on the kindle store. I would contemplate buying the book only if it weren’t available on the Kindle store or if it  were extraordinarily priced.

I had gone to Blossom with about a thousand rupees of coupons (collected over various quizzes) but was able to spend only half of them. Solstice at Panipat (about the third battle in 1761) wasn’t available on the Kindle Store. It was a similar story with KA Nilakanta Sastri’s The History of South India. Jane Jacobs’ Cities and The Wealth Of Nations was available on the Kindle Store but the Blossom price was too tempting.

I realize that despite my binge on the Kindle Store, I have more unread physical books than e-books. I wish some day Amazon were to come up with a program where I could exchange physical copies of my books for ebooks. That way I’m sure I would read more.