It does seem like a good approach, though that seems to imply that they understand the context of the prompt being entered. Has anyone tackled this context sensitive model routing? It seems like a good approach, but likely not straightforward.
I'm a product seller on Houzz and it's been a great platform for us to reach a more design-centric clientele.
Though from my perspective, it seems hard to tell what their main focus has been over the last year or so. I've talked to friends and coworkers and they all seem to know about the site, though mostly only know it for the great interior photos. Many seem to miss the fact that many of the products in the photos are also for sale.
I haven't seen many improvements in the seller tools over the past year, and their service team seems very manual. Example: It can take days for them to respond to processing a return request. Something that I can by myself on many other platforms. I feel bad for my customers who need to deal with a return or support request from them as a lot of what I can do to help instantly is simply not available. I hope with the additional resources they can direct some of it to customer support improvements soon.
That all said, maybe the store on the site is just an afterthought and they have some other grand scheme at play.
Thanks for the link, have been looking for something like this to quickly test out some ideas. I appreciate that I don't need a credit card to see if it will work or not.
As both a buyer on Amazon and a seller, I have mixed feelings regarding this.
On the buying side, I've seen how hard it is to wade through the reviews to buy simple products. Though I would say that it's mostly recently about product quality rather than review quality.
On the seller side, the issue is that when you launch a product and have no reviews, you won't get sales. Without reviews and sales, your product slides down into the depths of Amazon. Without the ability to give away products for reviews, we are only left with waiting for reviews to come in naturally or paying a lot for Amazon PPC to continuously force the product to the top of the stack hoping to generate some sales and then ultimately reviews.
There has to be some sort of middle ground for this sort of thing. I would think there has to be a way to launch on Amazon that can get products out to real reviewers, and still somehow weed out the "fake" reviews. It's telling that they didn't remove it for book sales as pre-release reviews are so entrenched that they didn't dare mess with it. If it's working for books, in theory, it should work for other categories.
Of course, Amazon does have a way to do this legitimately through their mysterious Vine program that you need to be invited to. Though it doesn't seem they really have a direction or know how to handle the issue themselves. For the time being, I can only assume that this will drive the review sites underground.
As of now it's working in China. I'm able to access Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Google without my normal vpn or ssh tunnel. Will be pretty useful if it stands up to the constant changes. Great work!