I’m in the market for a honing guide for chisels and plane irons. I bought a cheap one, and the little feature it has to grip the sides of chisels wasn’t big enough for my chisel to fit in it.

I found a model I thought I liked on Amazon, but there was no spec on the thickness of chisel it could grip. I asked a question, “How thick of a chisel does this hold? NOT the width, the THICKNESS” Two answers, 1. “i dont know” and 2. 1/8" - 2 1/4" (which was the numbers for the chisel WIDTH spec’d in the ad.)

When someone asks a question like that, it doesn’t seem to go to the seller, it goes to other customers. People get a question in their email. And a lot of them are shitheels who will dutifully answer “I don’t know.” Or they have the reading comprehension skills of the average hagfish.

I don’t think the users are the problem in the image though; I think it’s the seller’s fault.

Amazon has a feature where you can list for sale different permutations of the same item. Say you sell anal lube in 1 oz, 2.5 oz, 8 oz, 16 oz and 55 gallon packages, instead of creating an independent listing for each, you can have one listing with 5 variants. These can have different pictures or descriptions so customers can see and read about the differences, but it’s supposed to be broadly the same product so they share a question and review section.

If the seller is too ignorant or apathetic, they’ll list completely unrelated products under the same listing as different variants. There may be a theme, like “grooming supplies” so they’ll have a hair dryer, a beard trimmer, an electric toothbrush and a rectum bleacher listed as variants of the same product. Or it’ll just be whatever was on the truck from Shenzhen this week, hence the purchaser of a dash cam getting a question about an air filter.