Needed a replacement 700C front wheel for my commuter bike after the old aluminum rim exploded like a looney tunes cannon. It’s hard enough to find the right size when there are 3 competing tire/rim sizing systems currently in use, it doesn’t help when the people selling the wheels have no idea what the numbers mean either! All of these examples are from separate storefronts at the big online store. Ended up buying the wheel identical to mine from my local bicycle shop at the same price as online and with no shipping fee or delivery time.
The 3 systems in use are the American customary inch fraction notation like 26x1+3⁄4 (which is NOT interchangeable with American customary inch decimal notation like 26x1.75), the French metric notation like 650x45C, and the ISO 5775 metric notation like 47-571. I found the wikipedia conversion tables and Sheldon Brown’s tire size chart invaluable.
Try purchasing wires or electronic components from Amazon. Same shit, only worse.
Not to mention that Amazon search is happy to ignore most of the words in your search. So you end up sorting through pages of results that don’t match. Absolutely infuriating and one of the reasons that Amazon is my last choice now. Someone decided that it was unacceptable to show “no matching results” and lost my business.
Part of the problem is that some seller cram loads of words into the article that have no real connection to the article as such.
I thought that was the problem at first too. But unless there are fields that are searchable but not visible at all to end users I have definitely found many cases where the term (and no stemmed version of it etc…) was in the listing.
For components and wires that are made to a spec, I feel far more comfortable buying from CPC or Mouser.
Amazon sellers just feel like a coin flip if the guy is going to ship you CCA 24 AWG instead of OFC 23, in the hope you don’t notice or bother complaining.