Shopping with Gemini Fixes Broken E-commerce

by Rian

I’ve been using a counter top oven for all manners of baked goods. The one installed in the wall is a convection microwave which only mimics the function of a standard oven; it’s a story for another time why I stopped using it for baking. Regardless, the counter top oven is significantly smaller than ordinary ovens used in home kitchens or otherwise. It doesn’t even fit a full sized baking sheet, let alone stack them to bake multiple items.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one in this boat, especially in this day and age when most people can’t choose their kitchen appliances — e-commerce does have our back. In fact, most amateur bakers like myself only bake one dozen or two at most. Perhaps during the holiday, I would wish for a bigger oven and a bigger set of pans and trays. Sellers know this, and pans and trays, frequently sold on the popular (and now infamous) e-commerce in South Korea, such as Coupang, come around at 6 to 12 cups for muffins.

I’ve been shopping for a 12 cups muffin tray for ages. My Breville countertop oven has inside length of 35 cm, (roughly 13.75 inches) and my go-to size for pans are 34 cm tops. The problem is, I cannot trust neither the product listing nor the seller to be up front about the simple baking trays. Majority of the baking pans I’ve bought were simply named ‘tall muffin pan, 12 cups’. Nowhere to find out which company manufactured it, let alone the dimensions of each cups. Few had rough estimate of its dimensions in the product description, 34 cm, like I wanted, except the items I ultimately received were 35.5 cm.

Later I found out these products are nothing short of white labeled generic items. Sellers don’t care if it’s 35.5 cm or 34; the measurement on the product description says there is 1 cm discrepancy and they argue that’s a reason enough not to accept returns. Not only I bought several, I ended up returning the last one as it was identical to the one I already owned but with a different label. If anybody asks why Coupang made a landfall back in the days, it wasn’t the shipping; it was the reasonable return policy.

E-commerce in South Korea is even more broken than how I shopped in the US, as majority of the product listings are inaccessible by search engines. Neither Naver nor Google has in-depth indexing of what are listed across the Korean web. I was bamboozled to find out Naver’s own e-commerce, Naver Shopping, could not help me narrow down my search. After all, isn’t the size a first search criteria to consider as an e-commerce platform?

My supposed strategy here was less an idea, but more of a futile attempt that resembles an algorithm. I queried Gemini to find a muffin tin that will fit inside my exact Breville oven. I’m not going to play pretend, but Gemini already had issues narrowing down the size of my oven, which led to useless answers, including pan recommendations. So I ended up narrowing down the question again: search for a tray that is either 340 mm or smaller. Gemini says it found a product listing with a review that mentions Breville, except mighty Naver does not make it easy for me to search product reviews either. I went with my gut, and finally, got a tin that fits.

My takeaways from interacting with Korean e-commerce is this — stop pretending, and actually make product descriptions and reviews useful. I should be able to search about the product descriptions, and the reviews should be searchable too. What’s the point of reviews if they are simply stacking up and doing nothing? Nobody trusts 5 star based reviews anymore, because it doesn’t carry any weight. There are so many ways to improve e-commerce experience, and I hope the absence of a major player doesn’t devolve into a chicken game with no real gain.