As the years have gone by, Amazon’s influence over online retail has grown and grown—and that means you can pick up a bewildering number of products from the digital storefront. Search for any popular gadget, like “phone” or “tablet,” and your results are almost certainly going to run into the thousands.
Now, having to sort through over a thousand different options can really slow down your online shopping—and a lot of the matches you’ll get might not be the best quality. Anyone and everyone is pushing their products though Amazon now, and it’s not always easy to pick out the good stuff from everything else.
However, there are some search tricks you can use to improve the situation, narrow down your results, and cut out a lot of the products you don’t want or need. We can help you cut down the amount of time you spend searching on Amazon, and help make sure you end up with a better purchase at the other end.
Searching and sorting
Credit: Lifehacker
Rather than just jumping right into the search box at the top of the Amazon website, it’s a good idea to click the All button to the left of the box and select the product category that you’re actually interested in—type in your terms, hit Enter, and already you have a more relevant set of results that you would have by searching the entire site.
Then there are the keywords themselves. As far as I can tell from my own testing, you can’t use search modifiers like you can on Google, that will specifically include or exclude certain words—at least, not reliably. However, being more particular in what you’re looking for can sometimes help produce better results.
If you’re looking for a particular brand of phone for example, then include this in your search. Any specs that you’re set on—like storage capacity or waterproof rating—can be included too, to narrow down the results. It’s not an exact science, and it doesn’t always work perfectly, but it can make a significant difference.
When the results show up on screen, direct your attention to a small but important drop-down menu button up in the top right corner: By default, it’ll say Sort by: Featured, but you can change it to sort your results in a different way. You can get the most expensive, the cheapest, the best reviewed, the best selling, or the newest items up at the top of the results using this menu.
One other alternative search idea worth trying is to run a normal Google search with “site:amazon.com” appended on the end of it. You don’t get all of the Amazon search features (such as the ability to sort by price) with this method, but it can be useful in picking out products that more accurately match your keywords, especially if you’ve got a very specific search in mind.
Applying filters
Credit: Lifehacker
The temptation when you’ve run an Amazon search is to start scrolling through all the results you’ve got on screen straight away—but you shouldn’t do anything before you’ve checked out the filters down the left of the screen. These will vary depending on the type of item you’re searching for, but there will most likely be a whole bunch of them.
Some of the more useful ones: Filtering by four- or five-star customer rating, filtering by maximum and minimum price, and filtering by products that have arrived in the last 30 or 90 days. If you’re a Prime member, you can also select All Prime to see results eligible for Prime delivery (this also seems to cut out a lot of the sponsored results, too).
These filters can get very specific if you’re looking for something in particular. In the case of smartphones, you’re able to sort by display size, by battery capacity, by phone camera resolution, by storage capacity, and even by battery size. You can very quickly cut out the search results that you’re not particularly interested in.
If you’re looking for cleaning cloths, meanwhile, you get filters that cover the cloth shape, the dimensions, the material they’re made out of, and the features they offer—from antimicrobial to lightweight. To some extent the effectiveness of these filters depends on how well sellers have labeled their product, but most of the time you’ll want to buy from sellers who’ve taken the time to fill out this information.
A little bit of trial and error might be required to figure out the filters and the sorting order that work best for you, but some filters—like the ones to put restrictions on price levels—are going to come in handy most of the time. You should find that you’re able to get to the checkout page more quickly, and with a better product in your basket.
