I see the exact same thing on Play Store, and I think Google is outright complicit in fraud. The top result when you search for an app, even if by exact name, is always, literally 100% of the time, not the app you are looking for, but some other ad-infested knockoff spyware shit whose developer paid Google to be placed before the real thing.
I saw a google authenticator copy (using the old icon but named Authenticator) about two weeks ago. It was the top result but an ad and not by Google. Sad I didn't screenshot it, couldn't find it when searching Google Authenticator again.
Yes, theres a similar one for Microsoft Authenticator which obviously tries to con you into installing it by also advertising that it allows you to "sign in to your Microsoft accounts".
It annoys me so much that every authenticator is just called authenicator these, days. like its google authenicator, or microsoft authenicator, not just authenticator
I was using someone's computer who didn't have ad-block and this is rampant with Google's web search too.
It's unreal to me that you can search for a specific doctor's name in a specific town and end up seeing a sponsored result that uses the doctor's name in the ad's title but it's not the real office, instead it's someone else entirely.
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“
I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this:
1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an ad for a competitor at higher priority than the actual result.
2. Fraud. If I search for a product that Amazon sells and Amazon shows me an ad for a different product first and hides the product I searched for below the fold, they are effectively telling me that they don’t have the product I searched for and possibly that it doesn’t exist. It seems to me that this is deceiving me for commercial gain.
3. Fraud again. If I search for a specific book and Amazon shows me an ad for that book, I think they’re trying to trick me into clicking that ad so they get extra revenue even if I don’t intend to click an ad. (And they’ve defrauded the ad buyer too. Those clicks are bogus. Seth Godin should not be charged for a click when the clicker was searching for the book by a good approximation of its name!)
Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions :)
It reminds me of an analogy I read a while ago in an article critiquing keyword based online advertising (can't find the article unfortunately). A restaurant wants to drum up new business, so the owner tasks three employees with handing out flyers with coupons attached. The coupons are marked to identify which employee passed them out, and each week the owner gives a bonus to the employee whose coupons get redeemed the most. Week after week, the same employee keeps getting the bonus. The other two get more and more suspicious. Is he some kind of marketing genius that's able to get tons of people to use his coupons? Finally, they ask him how he does it. He says, "I stand in the waiting area of the restaurant".
This guy's publisher is paying Amazon $1/click to show the book to people who are already going to buy the book. It's basically the same thing.
You raise a good point. This phenomenon is well-documented for at least two decades now on Google search. It is common for brands to buy keywords for their own product. Why? If not, competitors will by the same keywords to direct customers away. As I understand, this has existed for more than 20 years and Google has never been sued for it (that I know). Maybe this is just part of a highly competitive online search market. To be clear: I am not saying that I like or agree with this market outcome as a consumer, but I am merely saying it has existed for a long time and gov't regulators don't seem to really care.
I don't know how it is for large businesses, but if you're a small business, and you put your own business name as a search keyword for your ad buys, fully half or more of your ad spend will be your existing customers looking for your website, phone number or address. If you stop spending on it, they will still find you, but a competitor will probably show up above you. I am not sure this matters.
Depends on what ads are showing and what they are bidding (vs. what you can afford to bid for the marginal traffic) but yes can be very much worth it to pay google's troll toll.
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“
But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.
It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.
I'm equally confused here. Who searches "Seth Godin The Knot" and if the first result isn't that exact book, goes and buys a book about knots or weddings or something? The book should be there in plain view at the top of organic best matches. Did they really test this "yield" claim?
It’s worse than that. If that employee isn’t standing in the waiting room, handing out coupons some other restaurant’s employee will be standing in the waiting room, handing out coupon for the restaurant next-door.
Oh, and you have to pay the building owner for the coupons which also discount your food.
People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".
You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.
This reminds me of my dad's story about decades ago as a kid paperboy they had a contest get people to sign up and who ever had the most after a few months would win a bike. He smoked everyone. They were desperate to know how he got so many people to sign up but he refused to tell them.
His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.
> back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted.
This case is even worse than the restaurant parable, because in that one the customer is already pretty much guaranteed and the coupon will give them enhance satisfaction that makes them more likely to come back. In Godin’s case, the customer doesn’t get that $1 and may not even buy the book, they may e.g. just be looking for the page to read reviews or link it to someone else.
Burnt myself on this in Google Maps just this week. I had an appointment in my calendar with the location set to "Dr Firstname Lastname, 123 Main St, 12345". I clicked through it into Google Maps and since it had the full address specified I just trusted it. Well, it turned out that the first result was actually an ad for a competing doctor 20 minutes in the wrong direction.
To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...
Same! I searched a local pizza place to pick up a pizza I had ordered and took the first result. I searched for the exact name, I saw a picture of pizza, and I hit directions. Halfway there it didn't feel right and I checked. It was Dominoes. I was furious and my pizza sat for an extra 7 minutes.
I needed directions to a family member's house after she moved. Clicked on her address from the text message, and Google tried to send me to a real estate agent's office instead.
This is egregious. I would be livid if I drove 20 minutes to an ad buyer's location instead of the actual address, after putting in the actual address to google maps. This is completely the opposite of what a map should be doing for you.
If you can, use Apple maps for now, although Apple has proudly proclaimed that they will be serving ads in maps soon. I also refuse to use the maps.app.goo.gl short links that google maps always wants to send. They will trap you in the compromised google search ecosystem. Insist on using raw addresses. I will paste in the raw address every time someone in a group chat sends a goo.gl link.
Do they even have any idea that their ads are showing up for the specific competing doctor? Isn't Google the one deciding where the ads are most valuable?
If they don’t know, showing up and telling them will let them know.
If you excuse the effects that people’s actions have because they didn’t realize they were causing them, you guarantee that those effects will never stop.
These are creative, but you haven’t thought them through. Do you really want brands to own trademarks on their keywords? So that when, to pick a random example, you search the internet for “1-800 Contacts,” nobody else is allowed to show an ad that says “Hey Amluto! We sell the same thing cheaper!”[1]
2 is just being bad at business. Which is why I’m skeptical it happens.
3, I hate to break it to you, basically happens in every major store you walk into in America. Google “slotting fees.” If you think customers want an alternative, apply to YC!
IIRC, at one time, in Aotearoa/New Zealand at least, Coca Cola Amatil (or whoever it is) had trademarked 'Always'. It may have been some other word, but it was definitely a common word. And it wasn't the particular branding, just the word
> Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions
Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc.
Can we make a class action lawsuit target multiple storefronts? Apple and Google desperately need to be gently reminded of this less. With a power drill attached dildo. Their searches are trash, first hit is always an ad.
I don't want any of your arguments to be supported in law.
The day someone can sue me because they searched for something on my web site and what they expected didn't come up, my web site is effectively legally prevented from having a search box.
The action needed here is anti-trust style / monopoly action. If there were viable competitors it wouldn't matter what Amazon's search box does. The fact the US government is in denial about the whole principle of the need for robust anti-trust / competition enforcement that is the core issue here.
I understand why you are opposed to the arguments and I like the idea of anti-trust action, but ...
The anti-trust cases I am familiar with spanned decades. Perhaps it's not a representative sample, yet it also makes sense. Anti-trust basically says they're doing something that is normally legal, but they're abusing their power over the market in a way that makes those actions illegal. You're moving from prosecuting actions to intent. That is a whole lot more difficult to prove.
I'm also uncertain how I feel about prosecuting a company just because it is a monopoly. I absolutely hate monopolies, and large monopolies almost certainly got to where they were by illegitimate means. On the other hand, it is difficult to untangle legitimate consumer choice from a monopoly manipulating the market to remove that choice.
The reason this is a thing is that other people can bid on your product (Amazon has an entire sponsored product category for this reason). So the reason for Seth Godin to bid on ads for "Seth Godin The Knot" is to try to crowd out other people bidding on the same term (eg another book on the same topic). Can be smart but you don't have to play this game if you don't want to, and the ACOS will tell you if it's worth playing. Even if you don't bid on those ads your own product will be the first result. It's just whether you want to bid up the price for competitors -- if you don't bid on your own product someone else can come in and buy the ad spots cheaply.
1. If you get banned from Amazon largely this is very bad for business. They can find a reasonable excuse I’m sure!
2. Fraud is a stretch, these things are labelled even if it’s deliberately designed to be difficult to understand. The discovery on this would be fascinating though because I can guarantee you there’s records somewhere of a ticket to make things more deceptive…
3. I don’t think the fraud thing will get you the results you want (I guess this is a slightly ironic statement given what we’re talking about). According to Claude it’s more likely deception under “FTC Act §5” but you can’t directly do this anymore and apparently “Amazon reinstated binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver in its Conditions of Use, effective 14 August 2026.” So even taking them to court got much much more difficult.
I think unfortunately until a different administration (maybe one less motivated by billionaire donors) comes in, we are stuck with this type of practice.
This is terrible behavior and it should be condemned, but I see no reason it should be illegal. There’s no deception in any of this. It’s like going to a store and asking an employee where the Widgets are, and they show you the Doodads instead because they’re more profitable. This is scummy but by no means illegal. The Doodads are labeled as Doodads. The advertisers know where their ads can be shown and under what conditions they’ll be charged for a click. It’s all dickish but it’s not fraud.
This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking.
Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.
Yes. I paused reading at some point just to marvel at the clarity of writing. It seems absurd to complain about length, it isn't long. Maybe we have different ideas what good writing is, but I'd say this is in the top percent.
AI can mirror this style of writing, but it can't mirror the clarity of thought behind it.
Now show Seth’s audience (which has been accumulated for a long time) your explanation and theirs. I’d wager most people would be scratching their heads and rereading yours, while they’d breeze through Seth’s. In other words, your take may be shorter, but it’s not clearer or necessarily faster to read when aiming for comprehension. Seth doesn’t write for people who visit HN everyday.
There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. The people who made their names beginning twenty years ago by marketing these expressions are losers who have simply been proven wrong. It is monotonous middle brow repetition See eg the left wing expose of the above mentioned brain death in Maher Aquanno https://archive.ph/YJaZr better in their academic papers like Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/04866134261415639
When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
Since most things I buy from amazon are commodity type items I need quickly and cheaply, my method has been "Prime Only" + "Sort Lowest First". Add on a score minimum filter if the first results are junk.
If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.
The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).
It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality.
As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenient, fast delivery, easy returns and all that. But if you forego that convenience, there is usually a cheaper option: local shops, Chinese platforms, direct sales, etc...
It's confusing to me that amazon is in the ads business at all though. They're a retail service, not an ad business and it seems that all the ad business does is burn goodwill. They do have goodwill to burn, but it cheapens the entire experience.
How is it confusing? Most brick and mortar stores show ads for specific products. Online platforms other than Amazon do it too.
The only thing is that Amazon is more diversified than other retailers, in particular, they have AWS, essentially selling the platform that runs their website to third parties. It makes sense for them to offer sell their ad service to third parties too.
No one does it like Amazon, it requires users to walk through the sponsored ads before they can see organic search results, almost no other platform does this online. Walmart has a single strip of sponsored results at top, immediately leading to organic results, others like Target, HomeDepot do not mix in sponsored results with search results.
B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.
> B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.
Ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, even your physical Walmart store is also selling a lot of shelf space to manufacturers/advertisers (similar to how Amazon sell the first slot, or at this point first 'page'), especially those checkout lines (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-grocers-wring-extra-cash-ou...). That's why your on-boots retail staff can't change those planograms (which defines how to layout shelf space in a grocery store) willy-nilly, they're designed by the highest bidder. That's why those soda or chips seems placed in too convenient slots that are also 'coincidental' to those currently advertised in other ways, because it's, plain and simply, paid to be there.
How does the saying go, again? "You may not be in the ad business, but the ad business is in you"? Something like that? That sounds wrong, but sometimes it seems like the double entendre may as well be the reality.
Per the article, in exchange for that goodwill they get a billion dollars per week. Do we need more explanation?
To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.
I don't expect to get any sort of explanation from Amazon of course. I do think they are probably doing something that is hurting them financially. Acquired goodwill is extremely hard to measure and shows up in things like long-term customer retention and engagement, so you're not going to see it on an A/B test -- on a A/B test users come in with the same level of goodwill on both sides of the fork and thus their immediate behavior is not going to be dictated by this.
In many ways this is symptomatic of larger trends in society and managerial culture of looking for ways to measure things rather than confronting the messy subjective non-measurable reality.
The only time we'll get a true counterfactual is when a competitor arises who can meet Amazon's very high bar for logistic excellence but can offer a more appealing interaction, and then Amazon retail will die off without anyone understanding how or why it happened.
I still use Amazon despite them being burned because they seem slightly more reliable than other places, but only slightly and my goodwill to them is completely burned. Yesterday they delivered a package to a parcel locker 150 miles away, which is a double screw up because it was supposed to be to the door. They've also made it really difficult to see where a package will be shipped from (and so whether or not you'll pay import taxes).
But I'm close. My purchases through them are down probably somewhere around 80%. My girlfriend never really used Amazon and doesn't see the appeal at all - telling someone "it used to be good" makes you wonder what you're doing.
Even AWS has burned me and clients enough times that we pretty much don't use them anymore - an idea that was unthinkable a decade ago.
The other thing is that the more they burn this goodwill the more they'll be tempted to increase ad revenue, and the more the goodwill will disappear.
To be fair, I am not doubting this statement for your experience. However, I will say my experience is the opposite. Amazon, where I live, is regularly cheaper and/or more convenient (1/2 day shipping for nearly everything). This makes me ask the question: What is the "PPP" (purchasing power parity) of Amazon for each region? It seems logical that Amazon would be (in some regions): (1) cheap, or (2) nearly the same price, or (3) expensive. Of course, I am sure this also varies by product category.
> It is convenient, fast delivery, easy returns and all that.
Not, however, reliable. Ordered espresso filters, got counterfeits; ordered new monitor, got used, with a scratch in the screen, followed by a runaround game while demanding a replacement.
> It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
It has everything to do with amazon.
Amazon has chosen to embed ads into the navigation used to shop on their site. It is a conflict with the customer's needs in just about every way possible.
I think the only time I saw something so blatant was years ago at the Cheesecake factory, where they had ads in their menu (not really food-related)
> It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
It doesn't have to be that way. Can you keep your search results pure and put ads next to them. If the ads are good, customers will be interested.
Yes, you will have fewer clicks (i.e. less ad revenue) than if you try to deceive your customers by not clearly marking ads. But you don't have to enshittify your page. Enshittification also lowers the value of your business, particularly in the long term.
First, no. You have missed the point of the piece entirely.
Second, even if you were right, is that an argument for it working that way? If this were a blog post about how gangrene sucks, would you be making the same case?
I’m just going to keep doing this like once a month here forever: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
>If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place).
What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of its quality? How would I break through, if not ads?
There's also the fact that Amazon really doesn't know the best-reviewed item anyway, at least in any meaningful sense, since most reviews (including verified) are fake/inorganic.
Right. If the only metric was "best-reviewed" then more people would be faking reviews.
To be clear I'm not letting Amazon entirely off the hook here, but Seth's situation is somewhat unique in that "someone looking for a particular book" seems to me like a really different use case than "I want an air fryer".
And "Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive" falls a little flat when a main reason for shopping on Amazon is that their prices tend to be really good.
You pay Amazon $200 and give free product to Vine reviewers in exchange for a seed pool of "unbiased" reviews (see link below). If you're not worried about the risk of getting your seller account canceled, there are also other ways of manufacturing your initial sales and review volume.
You wouldn't, your product would languish in obscurity and unless the searcher knew the exact actual product name forever be on page 200 of the search results (As a Sci-Fi book author I found this out the hard way). Influencers and having followers can also help your product break through, but that's about it. Self promotion of your product is usually actively discouraged or banned by many forums.
But you're in the air fryer production business, not in the food video production biz (which is really saturated). So you likely don't have the skills to launch a food porn channel organically, so you have to pay a youtuber, which is not the worst, but the yield would be unpredictable (and more costly to test). Sounds overall better than Amazon ads, though.
So, your alternative to ads is… Ads? If you’re making a YouTube channel to promote your product, that’s still an ad. It’s just taking you longer (and probably more money) to get it out.
Maybe it really is impossible to run a business that way, and that's why Consumer Reports is stuck a stickler about putting up walls around its reputation for independence.
Amazon is a net-negative overall but I don't think this understanding is correct:
> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse.
This is only true in extremely simply scenarios. In reality, most of the time individual consumers may prefer something other than "the highest ranked item in this category." Maybe another company has a feature that increases cost but adds utility, maybe there's a brand you trust more that makes a slightly less popular version, etc.
The problems of parasitic advertising still exist. People still see ads for products they will like less than the top rated search, but it's wrong to imagine that Amazon actually knows what that person would like best. If matching people to products was that easy you'd have all kinds of 3rd party recommendation services making very specific recommendations to make money off affiliate links. Instead we have a million "top 10" sites that work about as well as picking the #1 seller in an amazon category: not that well.
You raise a very good counter to what feels like the main thrust of the guys article. It put to words something that felt "off" to me while reading it, that there was an assumption made that was never stated and was also incorrect - so thanks for putting that to words.
He seems to assume that there is 1 air fryer that everyone on Earth should be getting, and all others are strictly inferior. There are probably no products that exists where that logic is true. There is so much variation in cost vs quality, or entire feature-sets like you pointed out.
This bleeds over into incredibly "messy" areas too, like societal signaling. Someone might specifically want a more expensive version of something simply because it's more expensive. The author doesn't seem to account for any of this complexity, even the "simple" complexity of cost/quality/features.
The value that these types of ads can add is that Amazon can build up models that can "learn" and get better at matching every unique persons criteria and provide a way for vendors to get "matched" with that buyer. Obviously you can still critique this model, but to assume it's strictly bad feels like it lacks nuance/critical thinking.
I think the article’s argument depends on Amazon having a great search engine that can surface the Pareto frontier of air friers, not just a single universal best. Then contaminating that great engine with ads that strictly make it worse.
But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.
I don't think that nuance changes the big picture which is that Amazon has a conflict of interest between showing you the best product that you want, and showing you the product that the seller is most willing to pay to advertise. Quibbling over nuance just gives air cover to this fundamentally extractive rent seeking behavior. We really need stronger anti-trust action in the tech era given the extremely low friction and winner-takes-all dynamics of modern tech economy.
"Nuance isn't relevant here because I've already assumed what they're doing is strictly bad" is what I'm haering.
Engaging with the nuance means engaging with the fact that rent-seeking can only exist where value (real or perceived) actually exists. Amazon is only able to sell these ads because sellers get value out of them through increasing sales using the infrastructure that Amazon built. The fact that they capitalize on that by creating a market for those ad-buyers to compete in (rent-seeking, as you'd call it) is not remotely surprising, they should be able to profit using the systems they built up. This is akin to paying more to rent a "better" booth to sell at at a trading card convention; or for ads costing more during the Superbowl halftime than at 2am on local news. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of that.
As far as a conflict of interest, Amazon is still incentivized to get a potential customer to make a purchase, and (more importantly) to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If Amazon develops a reputation of giving suggestions for junk products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon. It's "naturally" regulated in that way. Gibing some governing body the power to regulate what companies are/aren't allowed to suggest to their customers feels like it's only relevant if this was a true monopoly.
Re: monopolies- Amazon is not hiding alternative products to those in the ads; customers are people with the autonomy to find the product that best suites their needs, and they still have full capability of doing that. There are also plenty of other ways to purchase products, I'd guess that 95%+ of products available on Amazon can be sold/purchased elsewhere, it's just that Amazon is the most convenient way (for both buyers and sellers).
You're right that I jumped to a conclusion, and it's possible I'm wrong.
One thing that is structurally certain though: Amazon and other major corporations have almost unlimited time and direct incentives to find reasons to justify this point of view, while the people whose interests are being potentially being harmed (all Amazon customers) don't have much concentrated resources or focused, actionable incentives at the individual actor level to put together the counter case. I think it's incredibly important keep this asymmetry in mind before dismissing a take like Godin's in favor of Amazon friendly talking points.
I appreciate your response and perspective, and I apologize that my reply had been more snarky than it needed to be.
I'm not here just to defend Amazon, it has it's issues, but it has also provided a lot of value to it's customers, all things considered (building out the largest most efficient supply/distribution chain ever, increasing convenience, reducing cost, and giving access to wide range of product choices). I just think it's important to take full stock of what the benefits are as well as to understand if harms are actually harms or just assumed harms. Basically, just to understand what the tradeoffs are, and that there's likely something positive to be found. I try to apply this thinking to more than just Amazon- like I said, I'm not here just to defend it.
Thanks again for the levelheaded response, I'll leave this feeling like I understand the point you were making better.
I think the idea is true if you reverse it: there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives.
This also lines up a lot better with other complaints with amazon: their inability to get rid of counterfeit sellers, the degree to which their reviews (and listings) are gamed, etc. Arguably the reason people buy garbage on Amazon has more to do with their lack of interest in policing misbehavior than ads (though perhaps the ads are the financial incentive to keep being lazy).
You can see this with the knockoff[1] plugin that flags "no-name" brands on amazon. Sometimes this takes out the listings you want and you need to consider it, but I think it's a pretty effective counter to the kinds of scammy ads this poster is frustrated with.
> there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives
OK, but the customer is the only person who gets to decide what that means. "Reversing the idea" is just making the same (imo faulty) assumption that the author is, which is that there is some known "good value" product that everyone should be buying. What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else.
If anything, allowing for ads like Amazon does is probably more likely to match a customer to the product that's "good value" for them. If someone consistently buys products after sorting price low>high, then you know something about their purchasing habits - giving them a recommendation to buy a $450 air fryer because it's "good value" (decided by who?) isn't helpful when they really just want something barebones for $100.
I don't think that's true. I think deficient or faulty products exist and amazon often sells them. It is not at all assuming that everyone should buy one product - simply that there are psudo-scam products that would be risky for anyone to buy.
Like, are you suggesting that when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs? That doesn't seem very likely to me.
> I think deficient or faulty products exist and amazon often sells them.
So nothing I said disagrees with this. I agree that "pseudo-scam" products and counterfeits exist on Amazon, but if something is risky/dangerous for someone to buy, Amazon is at least partially liable for this - I got a product recall from Amazon for a water kettle (that Amazon doesn't make) that had some defect that could lead to scalding.
While it's a problem, Amazon is incentivized to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If they develop a reputation of giving suggestions for junk/scam/counterfeit products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon - at both the individual, and word of mouth levels. Your concern is "naturally" regulated in that way. Amazon wants to keep it's customers happy so it can keep selling them things, and selling them crap is a bad way to keep them happy.
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> when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs
What did I say that would imply this? No, I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that some people want to pay less ($100 vs $450) for a cheaper product (barebones version) and that's what represents good value to them - not something at the same price that's fake, I really don't know where you think I implied that lol.
Gotcha - then I think you are misreading my 2nd post - directing consumers away from psudo-scam products is "reversing" the understanding. Not assuming everyone wants one perfect product, but realizing that almost everyone wants to avoid known bad products. A bare bones $100 air fryer is good value.
> I really don't know where you think I implied that
When you said "What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else." you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value. I articulated that idea to an absurd degree in suggesting that you were saying some people would be happy to be scammed - which might be true if good value is impossible to understand objectively.
It's possible we're not on the same page on what you meant, but after your clarifying, it still requires defining what a "bad product" is, and that's not as easy as it feels like you're suggesting. A cheap product can be both good value and a bad product, depending on the type of product/intended use/customer expectations/etc. But it's up to the customer to decide that.
The main point I'm trying to make there is that customers are unpredictable (and irrational) and they have autonomy, and they need to bear at least some responsibility in making sure what they are buying meets their needs/wants, regardless of what Amazon was paid to suggest to them. This is true everywhere, like at a grocery store - it would be a silly article if it complained about more expensive or store-brand products being placed at eye-level when a "better deal" might be 3 shelves down. That's essentially what Amazon is doing and what the complaint is.
> you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value
This is something I stand by (see above), but you would have to take it to an absurd extreme to conclude that it means I think people are happy being scammed.
Being scammed on Amazon a separate problem, with other avenues of recourse (filing complaints directly to Amazon/requesting refunds, legal system for counterfeits or misleading advertising, etc.), and Amazon is financially incentivized to avoid it to keep customers happy/returning.
It's not that unknowable. When a customer makes a deliberate tradeoff that's fine. But some products are strictly worse than others. You can build a pareto front out of features and price and see which products are near it and which are way behind.
There is probably an air fryer that would be a good choice for the majority of people, and probably also the best choice for a large minority. This is probably true for a large number of popular products.
I think this comment is mistaken. The blog post is simplistic and doesn't cover the case you're describing of multiple good products for different consumers, but it's ultimately still right. Ads are not a good solution for this use case either because they don't exist to actually match consumers to good products, they exist to selfishly drive sales to their brand owners. That goal is parasitic to the service of product recommendation. Similarly with Amazon itself, their goal is to maximize some combination of sales revenue and ad revenue.
The solution to this is just what you described, a 3rd-party recommendation service. I don't think there's any reason Amazon should be able to make better recommendations than I can with a minute or two of research. Advertising giants only have a marketing profile on people, I think it's fairly limited in terms of how helpful it can be.
The problem with the "top 10" sites you mention is ironically that they are almost all actually advertisement sites, not genuine product recommendation sites. This means they get paid to place products and are essentially corrupt. I would guess the ecosystem is so universally horrible is because SEO costs money and requires them to aggressively monetize to exist. I've read that the Wirecutter is one of the only genuine sites and I find that it usually works fairly well at the price bracket they choose and for certain kinds of home goods.
I agree with the conclusions of the article, and I am no fan of Amazon or search ads on any product.
However, I would like to play devil's advocate for a moment to brainstorm another issue.
Let's say I build a product that is better than others in the market. We all agree that competition is good becuase it leads to better products and lower prices.
However, the algorithm favors entrenched players. A product that has been bought many times and has positive reviews will be the first in the search results and people usually buy that. Which means I have no way to compete other than paying my way at the top of the list.
I'm not stating this as the ultimate solution or even a good one. But I think it's worth to ask the question.
I don't love (but use...) Amazon but I think if done properly, ads can be relevant even when searching for a specific thing.
Let's use a Google Example: I search for Toyota RAV4 and get an ad for Mazda cx-50. Obviously Toyota hates that but as a consumer it has a chance of making me aware of something I didn't know but would want to know, especially as a part of a purchase decision. That's why Mazda pays for that ad slot, and also why Toyota makes it expensive for them :)
Obviously google in this scenario comes out ahead and it is annoying for some users but can be highly valuable if done well.
It's not how I search or shop but plenty of people do.
No. If I search "Toyota RAV4" what I mean is Toyota RAV4. If I meant Mazda CX-50 I would have typed "Mazda CX-50." If I wanted information about various mid-size SUVs, rather than one in particular, I'd have searched "midsize SUVs."
The number of times I have searched something, got back something I did not ask for, and found that helpful, rounds down to zero. It's actively destructive to the platforms that allow this kind of hijacking of search terms.
Agreed. Also a search along the lines “cars like Toyota RAV4" when I intend to broaden the search to other equivalents, because I don’t know the terminology.
Are you saying that because it’s across company boundaries? Or would you be similarly upset if one result was for a Toyota Highlander? Or for a Toyota RAV4 XSE but not the LE trim
I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion
Yes! It's very frustrating when I think I'm browsing several variations of a single product, only to realize that some of the results are a totally different product, the brand doesn't affect it either way. I'm fine seeing results for multiple trims if I didn't specify one.
The day searches started giving us ads instead of what we asked for (as opposed to in addition to what we asked for) was the day they stopped being useful. Which for Google was many years ago. This is not "cross shopping suggestions", it's an abuse of a monopoly for profit.
Literally everyone I know feels this way, even if they don't care about it as passionately. No one "appreciates" being openly manipulated to their financial detriment.
That’s pay to spam. Letting advertisers determine relevance of their product to a keyword is not exactly a user enhancing experience. When searching for rav4, i give you the ad for taylor swift concert, obviously understanding you can pay for it. This is spamming. “Relevant” ads should be determined by content producers
Would you, while shopping for a car, decide to buy very expensive concert tickets? Neither would I. So this campaign would have very low CTR and would perform poorly.
It would only perform well if you identified some actual source of latent demand. For example, maybe many people searching for Taylor Swift concert tickets would actually be happy with movie tickets to see a simulcast. At which point, you are providing real information to some searchers.
We can debate and disagree about whether this is something you want in your search results, but it’s not spam. Spam exists because it doesn’t have to compete in an auction.
You search for Toyota RAV4, and you get an ad for whoever paid Google the most money to fingerprint your profile and bias your purchase decision. Since when did we start trusting everything we see on the Internet?
In any retail webstore, or even on Spotify, YouTube, etc. all the searches are infuriating today.
If I search for specific terms then I get a menu of slop to choose from. Search isn't built to serve the searcher at all. Search is meant to surface things that are promoted, hyped, advertised, or paid for in some way.
So you search Amazon for stuff and a lot of crap added on to it. Any retail site's filters are useless for filtering out what you don't want to see or casting a net for desirable features. I swear--search for "bananas" at a grocery store and you'll get results for ice cream and baby food and Minions merchandise and organic pears?
This behavior has already crept into LLM responses. I often request that they compile a list of the top-5 or top-10 according to some criteria. And it never fails that they cannot resist giving me outliers and things that don't fit by any means. Now I don't know what influences an LLM to give stupid non-matching results, but I know they do. Is RLHF already baking-in advertising and sponsorship? I wouldn't rule it out.
Case in point: the other day I was thinking of Amy Schumer but couldn't remember her name. So I struck up a convo with Copilot, and described Schumer by profession, personality, and physical attributes. Copilot first suggested a slender Black woman. Then Diablo Cody. And eventually compiled me a list of 5-7 people who were nothing like Amy Schumer. Never once even thought to mention her. Once I surfaced her name by other means, I went back and scolded Copilot, just so I could feel smug and better about myself. But it's genuinely surreal.
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now.
Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'.
Somehow nobody noticed.
Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted.
The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy.
Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video ..
There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it..
We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.
Searched for jeans a few days ago. I got about 3.3% each, scattered through several dozen pages, of two American brands; 1.65% each another couple of brands; a smattering of one or two results for another couple of brands; the remaining approximately 90% were the almost exact same jeans (maybe the same), under several names... pages and pages of them. It is almost impossible to shop for clothes on Amazon now. It used to be just selecting for 1 or 2 day delivery only would trim down the chaff, although now those products are also serviced through the warehouses (and there are less options for one day or same day delivery than years ago, Prime or not).
Some of the products aren't that bad (most are at least better than these sorts of results would spit out when it first started, years ago), but the prices are also at the same not-too-cheap, not pricey moderate price-point as the (of course I know many of those brands are not American but I know how they fit) known brands. Whoever is coding language parsing at Amazon.com must be really challenged by the brands; I get that; but there has to be a way to make it less stressful to shop. Maybe Bezos is just secretly trying to get us all to
buy clothes where we don't buy food and books. Ha.
But yes, the language and sorting models being used by Amazon suck.
It’s not just clothes. Unless the item is a very specific name brand thing, I find Amazon nearly useless for discovery. It’s effectively Ali Express with much higher markup and much faster shipping. I suppose there’s a market for that.
Unfortunately for them, I’d rather buy cheep Chinese crap from a local retailer where there is still a human buyer in the loop choosing something that’s not the lowest bottom of the barrel junk.
When I worked there a long time ago I spoke to the search team about moving more towards a New Egg style filtering model. When I’m looking for something there’s often very specific features I want. Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want. I’ve bought more than a few wrong things due to this. Returns must not factor into whatever fees they’re making off everything else.
I guess for things like clothes or generic homegoods, I've seen this deluge of random China goods. But shopping for other things, like electronics, it does a really good job of surfacing what I'm actually looking for, whether that be name brand or generic.
If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.
Surprisingly, their "Alexa for Shopping" feature has been quite good for finding products that contain a specific set of desired features.
I was looking for a device that plugs into my car's 12V cigarette lighter outlet, connects with my phone's Bluetooth, outputs the audio to 3.5mm aux (my car has aux input but no Bluetooth), has no battery, automatically turns on with my car, has next and previous track buttons, and outputs USB-C with at least 30W.
Amazon's search filters were useless for this, but their LLM was able to read through reviews and suggest products that come very close. Unfortunately, no exact product exists that fulfills all the requirements.
Their LLM tells me that it can't perform searches and can't read reviews, and then does both things anyway. It consistently takes me at least 4 interactions before it begins to produce useful results.
It may be better than the uselessness of the Amazon search box, but that's a very low bar.
I went through that same search a couple times. I felt that this was such an obvious thing that I was amazed that it didn't exist on Amazon, Aliexpress, or anything else.
> Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want.
Not exactly, they'll show you the items they want you to buy/are paid to promote. They don't actually think you want the crap their search surfaces, at most they think they can con you into buying that stuff anyway as long as they make it difficult or impossible for you to find what you're actually looking for.
Yeah, the pity is that Amazon almost went this direction. They have a set of filters! They just don’t work. Not only do they clearly not want you to use them (the filters prematurely reset if you do virtually anything), but their coverage is weird and again, they don’t even work. You’d think Amazon themselves would have basic, valid data but they just don’t care.
As an example of how this stacks up, in the app, I filter air fryers to be red. Easy, right? One option, two sponsored, three more options, an autoplay video ad for a non-red one, then another sponsored link, “customers frequently viewed carousel with more sponsored links, one of which is not red, (so this is a full phone screen and a half with zero real results), one more result, two sponsored links, three more results, and then a non-red deep fryer, which is not even an air fryer to begin with. How does a silver deep fryer end up in these results at all?
The shittiness continues. A sponsored link to a toaster oven (not an air fryer either), another sponsored link, a real result, a used air fryer, silicone liners (not air fryers), a carousel of “trending now” including four of five items that are not air fryers either (and a low-rated red air fryer I haven’t seen yet… which makes me think they are outright lying about it being a ‘trending’ item), another carousel with “brands related to your search”, ALSO sponsored, two more results, another near full screen autopay video ad, three sponsored links for air fryer accessories, two real results for more accessories, then two more real red air fryer results, though one is only available used.
I’m exhausted just typing that out. It’s soul-crushing. A good two-thirds of total screen real estate in any given session is just pure ads. And I typed “red air fryer”, so don’t show me a red air fryer silicone liner! That’s not what I asked for. If you must, label it in a carousel that says “matching accessories, that’s both user friendly and appropriate!
Most of the stuff Amazon search spits out by default now is identical to what you find on temu, just at 5 times the price.
You can make it slightly more useful by changing the sort order to average rating or best selling, but for many "normie" things the bestselling will just be the crap amazon shows people by default.
The dark pattern I've noticed a few times is the exact match I type into Amazon search doesn't even return the item I entered but 2 or 3 entire pages of alternatives.
I know the item is there because Google returns it, either as a search response or in their "shopping" widget. I can click through Google to Amazon and see the item, sometimes even from the certified seller. But if I enter the exact search term in Amazon's search bar it doesn't show up in their own results.
Search is just there to show amazon what you want so that they can show you what they want you to buy instead. Companies want everything to be push instead of pull. They don't want you to be able to choose what you buy, they want to push whatever they want (or are paid to push) at you to buy, and you're just expected to take what little you're offered, thank them for it, and be grateful.
> Companies want everything to be push instead of pull.
This reminds me of Instagram's search page, which is full of animated videos jumping at you to dissuade you from completing the search you wanted and just click on what they want you to see.
Social media sites are full of this. They want to decide what you see or don't see instead of just showing you what your friends post in chronological order. Streaming services are another good example. They don't want to give you an A-Z listing of what's on offer. They want to show you a small selection of titles, repeated over and over across a bunch of vague/meaningless categories.
The last big redesign netflix made was pretty much universally hated, but they were mostly upfront about the fact that it was intended to take choice away from users and highlight the shows they wanted to promote. For a company that got where they are because people wanted "on demand" over cable TV it seems strange to hear them now saying "Choosing for yourself is so hard! Just let us tell you what to watch!" but that's the attitude every company seems to be taking.
Or every social media (especially Instagram)'s home page which shows the most engagement-baiting videos of this week and nothing from the people you follow
Yes, this is a horrible practice. Not just Amazon… most major e-commerce platforms set up fake pages for products they don’t offer to try to get you to the products they actually do.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
Google used to explicitly ban this and the very similar practise of keyword stuffing - they even delisted some high profile company sites (BMW is one that I remember) over those practices. They stopped caring about that sort of thing quite some time ago, and right now as they are in danger of losing what little most they have as people move to AI solutions where they are not the leader that they have historically been in the more traditional search space, I doubt it'll be any sort of priority for them in the foreseeable future.
Google doesn't care about you. If you have to close one website that is infested with Google's ads/tracking because it doesn't actually have the product what you want and you're forced to search for another website that's also infested with Google's ads/tracking that's much better for Google's bottom line. That's what Google cares about.
Until you stop using google search, which I and many other people I know have done.
Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.
Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a competitor's products.
It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.
Google beat out the competition by being better in a market with near zero switching costs. It can coast a long time without being the best option, but once the fall starts it’s always harder to gain back reputation.
Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.
“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.
> Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
Many products get worse so they are cheaper to manufacture, more shelf stable, etc and can therefore be profitably sold to more people. Sometimes the opposite happens, but in general when a company optimizes for people with less disposable income than you the product gets worse from your perspective.
I'm sure they know that. Cycling enshittification on and off seems to make more money overall than not enshittifying, even though it can make less during the downcycle.
Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins.
There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.
Why worry about how a stock will look in a decade when you can buy and sell in microseconds based on AI, tweets, and vibes. Screwing over users makes people money today. Long before the consequences kick in investors can jump ship to the next corporation victimizing their userbase. Google's probably too big to fail at this point though. If they push away users and the AI bubble bursts taxpayers will be footing the bill.
Becoming wealthy and maintaining wealth are very different mindsets.
Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.
As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.
What spiral? You just start another brand, producing extremely similar but unenshittified products. When that one takes over the market, you enshittify that one too. It doesn't matter that one brand died, because you keep making more. That's the cycle.
It’s hard for a large company to survive on something with a vastly smaller market share. You can make a living buying a portfolio from other people making it slightly worse over time and repeat, but the pipeline gets expensive and the market is fickle.
Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.
Is that the "Amazon Tax"? I thought the Amazon tax was their goofiness practice of taking a very large % of all sales in their site, and banning companies from selling their same goods for less on any competitor site.
Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.
Amazon's AI search doesn't do that, however. For that reason, 90% of my searches are now prompts to the AI, instead of regular searches. But it occassionally freezes the app.
Interesting. I always click through to the regular search instead of waiting for the AI results to load, under the assumption that they'll be even worse (somehow) than normal search. Maybe I should give it a try.
This "dark forest" feeling is what has recently driven me back to brick-and-mortar stores. Of course they can and do manipulate me via ads, store layout etc. but at least the store looks the same for me as for the person before or after me. They can't algorithmically optimize the store around my behavior in particular.
Has that actually happened in retail stores? All I can find on the topic is about online purchases (or ordering/paying online and picking it up at the store).
To do this in brick-and-mortar, you'd have to use remotely programmable price tags and detect who is looking at what, which seems doable, but then you still run into all kinds of tough questions with no good answers. If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register? And did a legal sale even occur if I wasn't aware what I would be paying? I don't think it's going to work.
As of now, my local supermarkets still have price tags on the shelves. And if there's a higher price at the register when the item is scanned, they will honor the shelf price if you call it to their attention. The biggest supermarket now has e-ink shelf tags so I assume those are synced with their item database so that doesn't happen anymore.
it's the other way around, the shelf prices can be stable and they decide which discounts you can get based on your shopping profile which they built using surveillance
I never get coupons for what I actually buy, I only get coupons for things I don't buy. Those things are sometimes related, but if I wanted the other brand, I'd already be buying the other brand.
Depending on the retailer, they may have little say in what goes on sale. I work for a retailer and 98% of our promotions are based on what our distributors and producers offer us, whether it directly says manufacturer coupon or whether we handle the discount after the fact as a scan-back/credit.
The local supermarket chain near me has more or less done away with normal low prices on the shelves. If you want anything resembling a deal, you get to deal with their shit-tier quality app plus other friction inducting time wasting crap like "clipping" digital coupons. Plus opting in to all the associated tracking the app does in order to use it.
They effective raised prices 10-20% for the entire store and then the only way to get a deal is use the app. This is only currently slight hyperbole - every month it rolls out more and more in this direction.
This way they can tell regulators "we only give discounts in a discriminatory manner! We don't raise prices!" when the time comes.
With any luck a judge will see right through that unmitigated bullshit, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
This predates the 'Apps' by a good margin. Safeway used to do this a decade (or more?) ago. All the prices in shelves are artificially jacked up. Only if you use their 'card' you got real prices at checkout.
I refused to get their card and stopped shopping there.
Requiring the app also disadvantages the elderly, particularly with dementia, who can't operate a smartphone. In theory, the cashier is supposed to allow anyone to access the discount on request but, in practice, I've seen them get rather unfriendly, even to the elderly, when they have to go through the process of manually punching in the discount.
> If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.
Don't expect discounts on what you buy often. They know they have you hooked on those already and they'll drive up the price on those items (for you) the minute they can. They'll give discounts on brands you don't buy to entice you to switch (if those other brands pay them enough to do it). These surveillance pricing systems are not for your benefit. They aren't there to save you money. They only exist to take more of your money away from you.
is that still ok when you're paying more because you don't shop as much as the people who live in the wealthier part of town? or what if you get fewer discounts for being male?
Yes, it's happening in brick-and-mortar. They've been conditioning people to accept the idea that prices will differ depending on who is doing the buying through the use of apps and loyalty cards (https://web.archive.org/web/20201111164410/http://www.nytime...)
They've known for a long time now that their profits will go through the roof if they can get away with it, but the fact that consumers find the practice offensive has held them back along with the cost of initial investments in things like digital price tags and facial recognition systems (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/s41272-019-002...) but all of it is coming. The big chains have already started. By the end of this year Walmart should have digital price tags in every store. Facial recognition is spreading too (often using loss prevention as an excuse). The grocery chain Kroger announced they'll be using facial recognition to offer different prices to different people. Their digital price tags scan faces, and your track appearance and behaviors, like how long you spend looking at various products.
It'll be simple for stores to do things like charge people more when their cameras see them wearing expensive clothes, or when the data collected from their app shows that they live in rich neighborhoods or when they can use the data they collect on you in combination with information from data brokers to learn what your income level is. I fully expect things to get even weirder like stores setting higher prices for people with the wrong opinions or political views. Algorithms will be caught "accidentally" discriminating on things like skin color and gender.
There's a little bit of pushing back against that kind of things in some places, but with the massive amounts of money on the table I expect that politicians will be bribed to allow it.
> If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register?
The store shelves have cameras in them. You won't see your price until the system detects you. They can even display your photo/avatar next to the price so you know that it's for you. Facial ID at the register tells them who you are when it's time to pay up. That's just for now though. Eventually it'll likely all happen in a cell phone app and you won't be able to as easily look over someone else's shoulder to see what price they're paying.
Somehow this doesn't scare me at all. Fast food restaurants have been doing this for like 8 years. Almost any order you could make normally, you could get a buck or two off of it if you order through their incredibly sluggish, bloated cross-platform-framework "app" and redeem a "deal." And they tell you this with giant ads.
The function is to get incremental sales (and hopefully establish a pattern of repeat business) by discounting selectively to people who might not buy at all otherwise.
If you're thinking "But they should give that discount to everybody!" that's not a thing. There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
My grocery store already sends me individualized paper coupons every month.
All of this is promotions. It's all just trying to get some incremental sales, and hoping that if you get an offer for free hot dog buns you'll also buy the hotdogs.
I've always figured the dream would be to be able to advertise a low price without ever having to deliver it.
Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".
But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you:
- possess one of a range of sanctioned devices
- have access to data services
- are able to create and manage an account
- are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry
- can claim the "deal" in advance
Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.
I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.
Agree. I see it also as, and maybe it's just the kinda wealthy area that I live in (though I'm myself a lifelong cheapskate)... I assume that the upper 50%, by income, of the people who walk into these places value their time too much to spend it dicking around to get the promos, so it's a convenient way to maximize the revenue from the people who don't mind wasting money.
> There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
Strange how this totally worked until a few years ago. I never cut coupons or any other time wasting shenanigans, but was able to stop up on deals on the commonly used shelf-stable items I buy without even needing to signup to a loyalty program.
I understand price segmentation is a thing. But it's gotten pretty exhausting and only increasingly so.
Fast food you can simply opt out of. My health improved due to them shifting all the "deals" to the app, and doubling menu prices. Groceries are a different thing.
I don't really care about fast food. That's strictly an optional luxury. If the experience sucks too badly, skip it. Grocery would be another matter.
I also think this hypothetical "scan to see your price" scenario is a lot worse. As things stand now, there's still a baseline price. If the shelf says $8.99 then you know that you may be able to get a better price through their loyalty program or with a coupon, but it will never be more than $8.99. In a fully dynamic pricing world where you have to scan scan to get a number at all, which is what a lot of businesses would really love to have, you'd lose that baseline. That item might ring up at $20 if the system decides I'm desperate or inattentive or just don't care. This is already possible online, of course. If it spreads to grocery stores, though, I'm going to start channelling Ned Ludd and it won't be pretty.
That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".
Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.
I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.
source: my parents were in the restaurant business
Location makes them try it once. Quality makes them come back every week. Which is useless if they never tried it once. On the other hand if you set up in a place where each person only comes by once or twice in a lifetime, like an airport, you don't have to make them come back and you just have to make sure the food is tolerable.
To be fair, restaurants have always had very high failure rates (something like 75% close within the first year.)
Keeping a restaurant open is more about managing costs than having good food; many die because of not great inventory and supply chain handling, for example.
As someone who notices a lot of things, I was talking recently with someone who notices almost nothing. When I spoke about my desire to seek out the truth, they simply replied, "I just want to live a happy life."
There’s a perception that those who seek knowledge and truth are somehow less happy. Ignorance, and the willingness to take the path of least resistance, can be seen as an advantage for those who would rather not look too closely. Fundamentally, perhaps the difference comes down to red pill versus blue pill, and the illusions we’re willing to accept.
A lot of knowledge and truth can be quite disappointing. I do think shielding oneself from truths and knowledge probably would make someone more happy. Think about it - do you think you would be more happy knowing the darkest thoughts and actions of those around you? Of those close to you? What if your spouse was having thoughts of leaving you? Would that make you more happy or less happy? I suppose you could say that if you were privy to their thoughts, you might discover that they love you and think about you more than you imagined, so that may be a net benefit, but I think we humans have a tendency to focus on the negative, and so an abundance of information leads us to focus on the negative things within the information, which makes us less happy.
There's nothing wrong with being a curious or attentive person who likes to notice things.
What I often see, especially in the social media era, is people who are selectively curious and like to notice negative things. So they'll share lots of articles with titles like "The Amazon Tax", which I agree was interesting and informative, but they're not at all interested in e.g. "How Amazon Is Bringing Fast Delivery to Rural America" (https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/how-amazon-is-bringin...). That's more of a problem, and I think it's what drives the idea that truth-seekers are less happy.
Except that this holds true for everything. For example, I only just today found out about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg&t=1157s, ie, Oracle's apparent complicity in genocide. Now that I know this, I now have to rethink things: what am I using that depends on Oracle that I need to migrate away from? This wasn't something I was concerned about just 24 hours ago. This is not to say it's not a valid concern: we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide, but this is demonstrably a case where I have given myself more work, more worry, from gaining knowledge.
Conscientiousness is incompatible with monotonicity of capability. That is:
1. We tend to believe "more power/knowledge/choices" is universally a good thing; that we are rational creatures in some sort of game theoretic landscape where we are free to optimize for our own outcomes, and extra options or information can only be to our optimization benefit.
2. We tend to believe that as moral agents, we have obligations to Good. More specifically, knowingly choosing against Good should in proportion produce Guilt.
The bind that results from (1)+(2) is distinctly Christian to me, obsessed as Christianity is with the notion of shame as a moral whip. It is an exercise in religionmaking how to structure one's psychological incentives so that solipsism is avoided while not sacrificing (1).
You’re aware IBM was not just complicit but essentially made the Holocaust possible with their counting machines? Had technicians permanently staffed in the fucking camps? The the numbers on people’s arms corresponded to IBM punch cards?
I wasn't aware of that, no. I can say that it wasn't a feature of our history lessons in school, nor in various Holocaust documentaries I have watched, nor something that came up in conversation with friends and colleagues, nor have I personally seen it when it's been posted to HackerNews (if this is anything to go by: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=IBM%20holocaust&sort=byDate&ty...). I only learned about Oracle's complicity because it has resurfaced in coverage regarding the current ongoing genocide. But you are proving my point: what do I do now with this information?
> But you are proving my point: what do I do now with this information?
I would use it to question the premise
> we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide
which in reality I decided was obviously wrong the first time I heard it, many years ago. In fact, I don't think this concept of "complicity" is morally valid at all.
They were, and still are - multiple times a year. But THE german holocaust was the most effective by orders of magnitude. And they have technology to thank for that. Computing machines (primitive as they were) made it possible to track the status of each Jew. Railways made it possible to move them. Chemical plants produced the gas in the needed quantities. Industrial incinerators made it possible to dispose of the remains. They didn't just go down to Home Depot and buy a bottle of poison gas. They had a system end-to-end as efficient as any factory.
Certainly this world comprises many other things than the Holocaust and IBM's support of it. Perhaps your awareness is lacking if you think that is the main thing to be aware of in this world.
Maybe say what you think they were saying? What is it with these maximally ambiguous comments?
To me "Are you aware of the world you live in?" suggests "If you don't even know this, you don't know anything. This is the first thing anyone should know". I'm willing to learng if they meant something else, but I guess that's asking a lot.
The point is that Oracle's actions are unremarkable in the context of the existing state of the world, and that corporations are generally not concerned with the morality of their customers.
This was, to my thinking, such a straightforward interpretation that it didn't bear making explicit; and your interpretation genuinely didn't even occur to me.
It doesn't surprise me that corporations [whose primary, if not sole concern is the profit motive] don't care about the morality of their customers. What I don't understand is why you're objecting to me voting with my wallet, something that's been a popular retort against progressive and humanitarian movements for at least the past two decades.
> I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.
That's a semantic distinction without a difference.
> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.
> We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now
a lot is worse now, but not shopping. on amazon some very specific items may be hard to find, and the search will throw a lot of crap at you, but you're still free to refine, compare and explore. finding exactly what you need and making an informed purchase has never been easier, and you get next day delivery (most of the time) plus exceptional return/refund policy and process. not sure about picking a, b or c? order all three, keep one, return the rest. i ofc don't (usually) do that, but i could. don't know how shopping could get any better/easier?
i don't like amazon as a company, it is evil and there is a lot to criticise, but the service and the value to the customer they provided has completely transformed shopping, for the better.
ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
I went to a camera store in-person yesterday for work. We needed a lens for a camera already purchased by our company, and we were able to shoot the shit with a super knowledgeable employee absolutely surrounded by lenses, frames, accessories, etc.
We ended up not purchasing anything due to some unknowns, but when my PM told me we'd just order what we need I told him if the price is remotely the same we should go back to the store a few blocks away because had I not spent 15 minutes chatting I would have wasted hours reading blogs/ads trying to figure out what I needed.
Frank and earnest question about using a company when you think they aren't a net benefit to society, especially when there are other options. I too have my reasons for thinking Goog, Amzn, and others are not good. I just don't use them. The other options seem great to me - I never long for what I'm missing. Momentum, habit, peer pressure, or something else going on?
>ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
Dude, nearly everytime I'm at a shop that's what happens. Not all are top top experts, but generally they have a very good idea about their subject and perform their jobs as if they liked them.
But that's Norway, not everyone is so lucky to live here.
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
Urgh... kills me.
I have some ebay alerts for items for one of my hobbies (nothing at all to do with cars). Sometimes if ebay has nothing that matches my alert, I still get an email with spare car parts that I can buy.
And today I was looking for specific brand of wine for a friend on a bottle shop's website. I got 108 results, none of which were for the brand I was searching for, many of which weren't even wine either.
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
It's been noticed, just not put into words very often. And it's not as if anyone felt like they could do anything about it.
In the past year, I ended my Amazon Prime membership and started shopping at Target again for this reason. A few items I do still purchase on Amazon, and that has been eye-opening: Checkout is now a minefield of dark patterns, filled with buttons that would reactivate my Prime membership in one click. Is their goal to drive me away from the service?
> search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'.
Years ago Amazon intentionally nerfed their own on-site search into complete uselessness. A step at a time they removed the ability to exclude a term by prefixing a '-', then they removed grouping terms into a phrase either with quote marks or plus+signs. For years these all worked well. It's no longer plausible that the reason is to serve semantic search results, they could still include synonyms lower in results while respecting exclusion and phrases but that would make what's really going on too obvious.
The real reason they nerfed their search so bad I often have to use Google with "site:amazon.com" is simply so they can serve up whatever results are most profitable which vaguely semantically match any term. This is a big profit center due to all the 'marketing programs' they push on third-party sellers. Paying for these is virtually required to get on the first page of any popular search. Amazon has a huge inventory of such listings and selling you one of those listing is more profitable for Amazon, but assuming the price is the same, less profitable for the reseller due to giving Amazon even more of their slim margin. Since playing this game has become required, it raises the ASP of all products - another Amazon tax.
Through the Bezos era and up until around ten years ago, Amazon was "good", meaning their broad strategies and policies were generally a net gain for most buyers. Things Like allowing negative reviews and no-questions returns made me a fan and allowed Amazon to destroy all its competition. Since then they've gradually A/B tested their way into, IMHO, pure evil.
For consumers, the only real net gains Amazon still provides is massive inventory and faster delivery for Prime items (although you may have noticed they are now also strategically degrading Prime delivery consistency). Everything else about Amazon is objectively worse. Products are more expensive, search is intentionally broken, the site is rife with paid placements and dark patterns. And no one can compete because as soon as a new upstart offers search that works or lower prices by not forcing all sellers into high-margin programs, Amazon will un-nerf that specific enshittification just enough until the new threat is exterminated.
One of the best Userscripts I ever made was for Amazon: It adds an explicit "results must include these search terms" input box as well as one to exclude results for particular terms.
Saves me SO much time when I have to find something on Amazon.
Have you considered making that into your own shopping website?
You don't need warehouses or delivery drivers - you can make it place an Amazon order to the customer's address through the customer's Amazon account. (All you have to do is ignore the fact that Amazon doesn't want you to ask for other people's Amazon passwords.)
As bad as Google's searches have become, they still do a better job finding the book on Amazon when Amazon's search can't find a book when I put in the title and author's last name. It is common for "sponsored results" to include trousers when I am searching for a book.
> I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999
Maybe I just learned it’s ways, but I feel like I was ~satisfied with AltaVista… I think Google came to eat their lunch in part because they took search way more seriously than DEC did.
Yesterday I tried to buy a light bulb for my kitchen hood on Amazon. I searched for 130V 40W light bulb. I ended up buying a 120V one because I gave up trying to find the one I wanted. I think I'll run over to the hardware store next time.
Is there a difference between a 120V bulb and a 130V bulb?
I thought we basically had 110-130V North American voltage and 220-240V Euro and others voltage as the actual voltage you get from the grid varies within a range.
Yes, but that isn't a thing that is actually manufactured, due to the lightbulb cartel. And if it was manufactured, they'd label it as 120V, long-lasting, because no country uses 130V power.
You can't just will arbitrary part specifications into existence. You can't declare that you need a 67.53 ohm resistor and then search for that. They only make certain values.
Oh no a reranker which optimizes for pclick (bias to cheaper items) and profit (bid and margin)
I don’t think the forest is dark (obvious financial incentives) and I don’t think we’re pre-Google (as you said, you can literally still find what you want, USING GOOGLE, even)
To me its a bigger problem. The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase to cheap countries. You could pay $10 for the brand name of a simple product or get the 100% equivalent for $1 from a Chinese Knock off. So people felt ripped off and abandoned brands. (reasonable since the brands were keeping prices high artificially)
However that has lead to a massive drop off in quality and price/value ratio of all products. Now the brands and the knock offs are in a race to the bottom for the lowest quality product/profit ratio so there truly is no difference and no quality products below "luxury" tier exist anymore.
Even some high'ish tier brands shoes like Hoka/Ons shoes have major quality issues even though they exist at just below the "premium" price point. I had two pairs of the same Ons last year, one lasted 3 months and started falling apart the other pair is still going 1y later. I wore them roughly the same amount switching between them. I looked up online and it turns out both brands avoid long term production contracts to bank profits from the lowest bidder at expense of their own brand they built.
Market for lemons, it's called. When it's impossible for the buyer to know the quality before buying, the buyer has no choice but to price the item as if it's always low quality. Otherwise scammers will just sell low quality items at high quality prices and it'll work. But if the buyer is only paying low quality prices, high quality products can only be sold at a loss, and only low-quality products remain in production because they can make a profit.
How do you even know something is authentic on Amazon, and not a counterfeit? What with the return scams and whatnot. That's why I avoid Amazon for most things are aren't close to disposable. I feel like there could a niche for a site that only sells as authorized distributor. To cut down on things like counterfeit and made-with-toxic materials items, etc. So no fly-by-night "marketplace" sellers. But what do I know.
That was basically my point. You don't even know anymore even with a brand name. The second any brand gains traction they sell out quietly behind the scenes and rug pull the quality.
> The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase
Ironically I'd say that this was what firmly cemented the concept. Brands truly gained their power when they separated themselves from what they produce and the name providing it. Previously, brands were tied to the quality of their items. When they separated the idea, it enabled brands to become lifestyles and cultural signifiers, which skyrocketed the profitability of being a brand rather than a producer of a good.
Yes, exactly—the concept of Brand means hardly anything anymore. Certainly due partly to outsourcing like you say, but I think even more generally due to financialization. In a financialized world, brands become purely assets, which can be swiftly created and destroyed on (digital) paper, or packaged and sold to the highest bidder. The brand’s products aren’t the product any longer—it’s the brand itself.
Amazon and a lot of other big companies feel like the corporate embodiment of the "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" line from Clerks. We are not valued customers whose business forms the foundation of their success. We are obstacles that sit between them and the money in our bank accounts. They'd prefer to cut us out of the equation entirely, but failing that, they will do whatever it takes to overcome. The fact that they don't actually want us in the equation oozes through every bit of the process.
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
I think many people noticed the change. However, when semantic search first came about, it was useful and not the only option. Being able to see items similar to my search term on Amazon was analogous to browsing products in the same aisle in a physical store, which was helpful when you wanted an item from a category but haven't decided on the exact one.
The enshittifying and infuriating difference now is that the choice of using semantic search have been taken away. It is often the only option, and the definition of things that are "semantic similar" is a mile wide. I appreciate semantic search when I have good use cases for it, but please give me the option to turn it off when I don't need it.
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I’ve encountered “no results” on DuckDuckGo at least half a dozen times in the last couple of months when I know there should be relevant results, and Google gives me relevant results (sigh; I think I had gone for more than a year without using !g). Most of these have been exact keyword matches.
When I came to Canada almost 30 years ago, IT-job immigrants, let alone people who've grew up in this system were already doing 'buy real estate, rent it out, profit' and their day job was just a means to finance becoming a permanent rent seeker.
Pikachu surprise face that a culture that thinks rent seeking is great ends up doing it everywhere, all of the time, including Amazon.
Assuming they were any good at it. They can’t even figure out basic product design.
You cannot have the purchase funnels you describe without better UI/UX. Amazon’s is abysmal.
Very often people leave Amazon and boycott them entirely (like I do) because the experience is so awful across the board.
I don’t believe they are “guiding” anyone to anything. Amazon only became profitable after COVID when they forced everyone to shut down so we had to use Amazon. Everyone noticed that and remembers.
You put them on a pedestal.
Ever tried to login to AWS? Login. A regular login form. They can’t do it.
You might want to read some of their quarterly earning reports and research papers their teams submit. Your experience is not commensurate with financial reality.
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and housing assistance, but I'd be willing to bet that amazon would make back some of it in increased amazon purchases too. It'd be great if the government cracked down on corporations who use taxpayer money to subsidize their labor expenses
I've long felt that there needs to be a bill passed to charge companies $x additional tax each year where $x is the amount of government assistance their employees required in order to meet food/housing minimum standards. One way or the other, the companies that are making the rest of us pay for their employees to survive need to be funding these programs.
The force comes in at the other end, where we beat up people for not having X dollars. If you beat up and murder people for not having foo and we all just take this for granted and pretend there's nothing we can do about it, then we have no choice but to assign blame to the part we can actually comprehend - the choice of who gets foo.
I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Ships from third party" schemes, this feels like a new low.
Paired with the article, it seems to me like the natural conclusion is that the company wants to move away from distribution and towards pure rent-seeking, in the most blatant ways possible, trying to squeeze as much cash as possible from their name while it has any value.
Imagine there's a best-selling toaster. Amazon can recommend it and many people will be happy buying it. Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm? To send a strong enough signal, it would probably need a level of sales that could only be achieved with some level of advertising.
Separately, I'd note that Amazon doesn't want high levels of returns (which it has to pay for in many cases), so they still try to herd people toward products that they will find acceptable. Might they not love them as much as some others? Perhaps, though this is a fine line to try to walk, and I'm not sure that Amazon is actually trying to walk it.
Shops used to curate their catalogs by in-house testing products from various suppliers. If a supplier comes up with a better toaster, they can send samples to the most relevant shops and convince them to stock it.
> Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm?
This is a solved problem. Recommendation algorithms aren't just "highest average rating", they take into account number of ratings, recent trends, etc.
Even if some ads improve this experience, Amazon is orders of magnitude past that threshold into hostility and toxicity. You have to scroll through pages of sponsored results to find anything worthwhile.
Same way youtube gets people to view new videos. By showing a few people the video and if they like it then show it to more people. Obviously for something as expensive as a product launch you'd weight it a bit more towards the new product than a youtube video but still.
It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S
More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
I was recently looking for a cheap IOT camera in a specific form factor from aliexpress and the results were so irrelevant I had to develop alternative strategies like finding one good result and checking under its recommendations or image searching from the one good result to see other using the same picture.
I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. I hate the number of 10-packs of things I get where I only need one. (Luckily I live in a block of flats where there's a good community, so often I get those for free just by asking on our Signal group!)
> The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc.
So much agreement! I have a bunch of obscure parts like 99 wooden dowels from when I needed one and had to buy 100.
Screwfix is sometimes OK for this, but I still end up in situations like the above where I have 99 wooden dowels that will remain in my garage for all time.
(For what it's worth, I also completely agree with Amazon vs stores like John Lewis etc, I haven't bought anything from Amazon for years now, and definitely don't miss it at all)
Big surprise when I moved to Germany was that there's a Woolworth's brand here that survived independently to the one in the UK which closed decades ago.
> The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc.
So much nostalgia for these shops. A man with a posh, sparkling clean apron knowing exactly what you need or mean. In and out in under a minute or two having parted with just 30p
Screwfix are actually pretty close in terms of service. Their staff are pretty patient with people and quite helpful. They mostly only sell packs of things though (and wow fixings got expensive... anyway. And it's ironic that the "trades" brand of the group that owns B&Q has better customer service than B&Q...)
Spending 30p in a minute means the store's gross revenue including cost of goods sold is at most $18.00 per hour, which is already less than a living wage for one person.
> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse.
"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. But there is value to show some noise in the search long term.
Another way to look at it is through the vail of ignorance. Suppose you're a manufacturer of air fryers, but don't know where you stand in terms of how competitive or popular your product is. Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Sure if you're the top 3 manufacturer, maybe you would prefer not to pay the tax. But if you're not, you'd much rather prefer the system in which you can.
How do you get someone to review your product if you're one of N? Paid reviews? Not independent anymore. Paying money to get some exposure and sales is the best of all bad options.
"The best" for many products is often static, on the level of decades. Better e-commerce websites than Amazon will curate away all the garbage and only show you the best things. At this point you can pretty much use the top 5 results from any Amazon search to rule out things NOT to buy.
There is basically no category of anything where there is something that is THE best, once you take buyer preferences and tradeoffs like cost, quality, time, brand, etc. into account.
>"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product ... Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?
Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rated one, at least until they get high ratings, and then can increase the price. If they're going to be losing money on marketing, it would be nicer if it goes to consumers.
This also happens in physical stores. In Walmart and others, good quality and good price items are at hard to find, let alone notice places. That happens because lower quality more expensive products pay Walmart for better placement.
> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model
That's assuming two things -- user desires and valuation models are identical (they're not, even within a single product view)
and that the state of products is static -- Once a product is best there cannot be a new best in the future. You have to have buyers try new products, some of them disappointed, to plot the shape of what is best or worst. Charging companies a fee means they have to be really sure/serious that what they have to offer is market satisfying (else they're wasting their money).
What we really need is for consumers to stop being so short term thinking and buying the cheapest item (on BNPL no less) and for Amazon to be held accountable for how they penalize people who legitimately compete with them (imo an anti-trust issue).
> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.
I am always surprised that people apparently think corporations want the best for their customers. They want the best for their shareholders. Sometimes the latter overlaps with the former, but mostly that's not the case.
I've tried to replace Amazon with other vendors where possible. You can get partway there, but half the time, my orders get delivered from an Amazon warehouse anyway. Smaller vendors have basically surrendered logistics to Amazon entirely. At least I'm not giving Amazon ad revenue if I don't order directly through them!
> When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place.
They’re entitled? By whose standards are “best air fryer” to be determined? Do all buyers have the same criteria for what “best” means to them?
I live in Italy, Amazon opened its Italian branch about 15 years ago.
Initially it had a smaller catalog of products, with products sold almost entirely by Amazon. They were delivering packages in 3 days and the price was almost always much better than any other online or physical shop.
Over the years they largely improved the delivery time. Now if I am ordering a package before 4PM there is a high chance I will get it the next day in the morning. Prices however became higher and higher, at the point that for many products Amazon is not that convenient anymore: if you need home appliance (TV, dishwasher etc) other online or physical shops are now significantly cheaper. If you look sport equipment (e.g. climbing, mountain bike, hiking) the specialized shops are usually cheaper as long as you are OK to wait for longer delivery time and maybe combine 2 or more products to reduce the shipping costs.
I still find Amazon convenient during prime days and black Friday, and because of the large catalog with many alternatives and sometimes useful reviews (need a new shower head, a new mouse, a hole puncher, a tire for the bicycle...) but prices are not as good as they used to be. But if you need something in a hurry, the fact that you can order today and get it tomorrow is a big plus.
Amazon search has been terrible for as long as I can remember. Not to disregard the scourge of ads that has infested the results but I've been frustrated with Amazon search for almost 2 decades.
Oh sure, their search gives you the impression you can filter/sort but due to zero policing anyone can say whatever they want about their product and I have the feeling Amazon just sucks at this on top of the seller malice.
Just try to filter down to the dimensions you need, the connector you are looking for, the material you'd prefer and you'll be inundated with tons of items that share not resemblance to the filters you entered.
I only want X brand, here I hope you want to see results from Z, W, Q brands as well!
I only want items under 2ft wide, here are 4ft, 1ft, 6ft options!
I want only <1' cables, here are 12ft cables.
It's all a miserable experience. Often I skip the filters because if they are so bad at keeping out the trash then I worry I'll also lose legit options because I have zero trust in Amazon's ability to accurately filter.
I won't pretend running Amazon is easy but I'm constantly in shock at how absolutely terrible Amazon's website is to use. The number of UIs that are clearly optimized around data retrieval optimization instead of serving the customer is insane.
This is the virtual equivalent of manufacturers paying for premium floor/shelf space in a brick and mortar store. The way to avoid it is to ignore the sponsored results and do some actual browsing - just like comparison shopping in a physical store.
My favorite is when I leave a one/two star review, and the (always Chinese) merchant writes me, offering anywhere from $50 to a full refund if I change my review to 5 stars.
I do. I like money. Amazon doesn't seem to care when I report them.
And once the money clears my account, I change the review back. I have one on my desktop right now, awaiting a $50 gift card. I mean, I still care about people reading the reviews. They aren't completely immoral liars, like the company writing me.
Not identical problem, but similar. If I have just read "Dombey & Son" and want to read more Dickens, I search "Dickens" and get Monica Dickens? ok, more fool me. But if I search "Charles Dickens" and get "in the style of charles dickens" or "based on charles dickens" then I am very unhappy, especially if that "search" was actually clicking the blue highlight link under the specific volume of dickens I just read.
I asked an Amazonian about this once, and they said the algo worked for them in sales, because enough people go to the "in the style of" or actually want that and so I am SOL.
You would think there could be a search setting "specific author name == author, no extras" or something, if they wanted to maximise utility and choice.
But this is how ads work? The entire concept of programtic ads is based on bidding for the highest leverage time and placement with $$.. So even you have the best product and your competitor outbids you, they get seen more and most likely get bought more?
And even if you go into a normal retail shop with a product in mind, all the available options showcased can "distort" your actual intent. Because that's what the shop is designed to do: to showcase, and even in that showcase, some products are placed/showcased so they catch your attention.
I doubt anyone chooses to create shoddy products just so they have more money to market them..
Why doesn't the supermarket just raise the price on its own? If it thinks X brand sugar can be sold for $4.50 and the supermarket should pocket $1.50 of that, why not just do that instead of doing all the weird accounting tricks?
I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.
I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.
Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
I look for independent artists and craftspeople. I recent bought a pack of sci-fi posters for my apartment from an artists who designs it herself and who has an independent reputation.
My goal has now shifted to identify the thinnest intermediary between my dollars and the person doing the labor for the product/service I'm paying for.
Etsy suffers from the same review astroturfing and product category crowding that Amazon does, but the product categories tend to be narrower so it's never quite as bad.
Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
The person you responded to has a good point though. It does take some diligence on Etsy to avoid people reselling or drop shipping mass produced items.
Some of the prices are crazy too. I wanted 4 tenting legs for my keyboard, found some on Etsy for £100 total (no joke). 4 of the exact same item from AliExpress cost me about £4 including shipping.
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.
I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.
The fact is that Amazon has at least two customers here: you, the user trying to find an item to buy, and advertisers, likely trying to convince you to buy a lower quality product. Who wins? I'm guessing the advertiser. They are far more likely to have a sales contact, anyway.
> And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)
They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.
They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.
Getting something 36 minutes after ordering it is a nice surprise and great customer experience. I’m usually happy with a day or two.
After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.
The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.
That's because you probably are using gmail, and Google is reading your emails and harvesting your shopping history. That's why Amazon is being secretive: to deny Google that information.
I am not using Gmail. I like having the actual order details in my email so I can keep track of various orders without needing to go to Amazon's increasingly sluggish website.
Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.
I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.
I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.
> I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.
> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.
They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.
>I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)
Alot of things are just fine, or more than fine, on Amazon (behemoth or not). If I know what brand I want, or I want a cheap version of something and the more or less guarantee if they screw up, it will be replaced or refunded, I absolutely would use Amazon. Some of the Amazon Essentials are a godsend if you cannot stand shopping. It is looking for new things, being unable to find exactly what I need without being overwhelmed, or not being sure of what of something to get, that gets me anxious.
Amused so many people here seem to be pushing etsy. I saw the same supposedly hand-made mugs on sale by hundreds of people on etsy a few years ago.
Yeah, same here. Shopping on Amazon is awful. Logistics and delivery, A-OK, but I don't want what they are selling.
I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.
It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.
As someone who sells actually custom created stuff on Etsy, it’s still definitely the best place for that but the alibaba and temu junk is growing on the platform.
This. I only have an Amazon account for a specific item - a dried soup mix that my mom who is off the grid, lives for. No PRime, no other purchases and if I could find the product elsewhere, I'd leave Amazon in a heartbeat. For the rest of it, my online shopping is mostly ebay. Been on it since the start and have had zero issues with any merchant or product (mostly used computer kit or repair items) that I've purchased.
I’m trying to get rid of Amazon but honestly it’s very hard. All vendor websites are shit, high friction, high bugs. Vendors consistently delivers significantly slower (like 2-3 weeks sometimes)
There is no single website that offers similar solution where my payment is saved and I can just buy and forget.
Only thing I’ve successfully replaced is grocery shopping.
In my experience, Etsy and Amazon are both following the same trajectory. Lower quality, lower value, fake and imitation products becoming more common, etc. On Etsy, it used to be the norm that a product would be unique, interesting, and probably handmade. Now, there’s a decent amount of 3D/screen printed junk that might also have some AI slop thrown in for good measure. The corporations have also moved in, just like they did with Airbnb.
The most common issue for me is what happened when I bought a custom dog bowl, thinking the ceramic was made by the seller. Later stumbled upon something similar and realized it was just an off the shelf bowl and the dog’s name had been painted on. That not worth nothing, and it was still probably nicer than what I could’ve gotten on Amazon, and maybe I should’ve asked before buying. But there’s just a lot of that, “make a quick buck” type of stuff and it’s not always obvious.
I deleted my Amazon account earlier this year. I have yet to feel like I am stuck and unable to get something. It has made me turn directly to the seller, so it then I know every single dollar is going to them, versus most of it going to the seller and Amazon getting a cut. It has also made me look closely at places in my city where I can pick things up. I've found a few new shops I didnt know existed because the default was Amazon. The only bummer was I lost about 5 years of Audible books, most I listened to once but a few were repeat listens. I will just pick them up on Libro when I get the desire to listen to it again.
Mostly I'm buying Amazon groceries because here in Boston if you don't have a car and access to Costco, wow are your local shops over-priced. Wholefoods, Star Market, and Trader Joes are all at least 25% more expensive.
> Oh yea. Getting downvoted for saying the truth. So modern Hackernews
I didn't downvote you - and I agree with the sentiment that Whole Foods is also Amazon - but the meta complaining isn't beneficial to the conversation.
Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined.
They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in either advertising spend or in the etsy-profiting metrics that drive algorithmic discovery.
Another thing that happens is your local shop will set up one Etsy store, the el cheapo junk stores may set up a huge number of different shops selling the same set of products.
The best part about not using Amazon is I get to get my stuff quicker, and I can see/feel it. Buying clothes off Amazon is basically the worst thing ever, for instance.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
Amazon built their own in-house logistics network because UPS et al. weren’t cutting it. They offer one-hour delivery for a lot of basic items where I am and it’s not even a particularly urban area. I think in urban centers those same items have 15 minute delivery. They are also the only ones who will consistently deliver on Sunday, when your local store might not even be open.
There are still lots of good reasons to shop local, but I’m not sure speed is the best reason.
I havent bought anything on Amazon for 10 years. Sure the local prices are infrequently higher but with 20%+ inflation over the last half decade comparison shopping is pretty much dead. Glad to support my local places or find an alternative or just live without whatever.
If you have a Costco nearby, highly recommend for the products they carry. I pay for the executive membership, and also ship products to where ever I need using their online shopping.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
Is the Costco shipping good / good inventory / similar or same as in store prices? Should I consider it if living in a city like ny?
I live in central nyc, been only a few times to a Costco, and had no idea they even do any shipping! I assumed that part of all those good prices is the smaller selection, large minimum quantities, and that you have to get yourself there with a car to get it in person.
Costco shipping is "free," but the prices on the website are more than in the store. I'm pretty sure it's based on weight; heavy stuff has a more pronounced markup. But, it saves you a trip, and the prices are low to start so it still may be significant savings. There's also a web-only deals section for clearing out inventory (I picked up some Philips Hue lights for half off).
I don't purchase from costco.com regularly, but the selection is generally the same as in-store and a bit more. The shipping is free, but slower than Amazon and faster than a couple weeks.
I love that Perplexity just beat them in court because AIs are at least one hammer that might smash this bullshit. It's so sad, Amazon is chasing every short-term dollar at the expense of long-term success. I have also been moving my purchases away from them - might as well buy direct from the Chinese sellers rather than use Amazon as a middleman.
If it is only 25% more, you are NOT getting ripped off. Mere economies of scale and purchasing power yield Amazon more than 25% lower costs. the mom & pop stores you accuse of ripping you off likely have even slimmer margins than Amazon, even at their prices.
Yes, all of us who are not wealthy must have an upper limit to what we can support, and maybe 25% is over your limit, but please don't ignorantly accuse them of ripping you off when you clearly know nothing of the costs of vastly different scales of business.
There are a lot of cases where I go direct-to-vendor. Particularly for niche products such as supplements and men's cosmetics, it is easier to find one or two trustworthy distributors or manufacturers who have most of what I want.
There has been a lot of consolidation in this space. Part of that means that independent webstores closed up and moved exclusively to Amazon. If they did not close up shop, they now use Shop/Shopify or a similar SaaS, which streamlines sign-ups, sign-ins, and checkouts, for better or worse. All the better if you've got PayPal or Apple/Google Pay.
I've noticed that a lot of "click and mortar" stores have really abysmal product on their physical shelves. Like, it's discontinued, or all the wrong sizes, subtly defective, or just undesirable. It's like their stores are kind of dumping grounds, and it makes sense, because the sort of person in 2026 who gets in a car, and shops in a store, and grabs stuff uncritically off the shelf is not your most discerning or astute shopper.
Target's shopping experience remains better than most. Their stores include everyday needs like groceries and medicine, so I can meet a lot of my needs by dropping in. Furthermore, their app-based shopping (marketplace) is pretty good too, so if I need housewares delivered or something, or I need to look up something and find it right now, in-store, their app is right there. And their shopping carts now have little dedicated slots to drop in your smartphone next to the cupholders.
The best online shopping is Office Depot/OfficeMAX. They've shrunk their retail footprint, but their online store is still a non-marketplace, and really good for buying the kinds of things they sell. That includes some non-intuitive buys, like you can find kitchen supplies, because they stock many breakrooms for small/medium businesses. Good place for electronics and accessories and art supplies, even if you are just comparison-shopping. Their delivery is rapid and often just comes from the nearest store!
Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home.
Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to rent a car to go pickup my package.
Amazon has absolutely nailed the delivery here. They looked at how people struggle with online orders and streamlined it completely. It’s such a blessing not to have to deal with delivery drivers anymore.
If Amazon charged €10 extra per package I would still order with them.
For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in the world by allowing alternate stores to keep going.
eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.
Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.
In my house we have something from Amazon show up several times per week. They usually deliver when they say they will (often the same day), returns are a breeze (occasionally they refund us and don't want the item back), and I don't think I've ever had an issue with counterfeit items.
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have.
I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.
Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s.
Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.
Not only are they mutually exclusive, the current neoliberal regime has dismantling the welfare state as its explicit goal.
Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.
This was something I would have never understood living in the US until I moved to France 4 months ago. And yeah, as much as I dislike the company, those lockers are clutch.
Package delivery is pretty good when you live in a country with a standardized address system, large homes and where the delivery driver can park in front of your home.
However if you live in a historical city center where your address is the equivalent of “That small door if you go up two stairs behind the old tavern” then package deliveries plain suck. Especially since you don’t have the “village postmen” anymore. You have ten delivery companies and none of them have fixed routes.
I live in Bellevue so by supporting Amazon I'm supporting a local business. It's hard to imagine replacing most of the things I get from the site with someplace else. (Though it'd be nice to have a Micro Center.) I've even started getting more grocery products as Safeway/QFC/Fred Meyer up their prices, and the Redmond Fred Meyer closed which had the best produce. Etsy is mainly useful to me for the occasional copyright-infringing merch.
Just going off the "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION" license plates, I'd guess not. Federal tax dollars are spent according to the whims of literally everyone else in the country except them.
It's a local business to nearly everyone in the US. Anyways, it's not a local shop as the person you replied to called out.
Shopping at Amazon perpetuates the monopolization and consolidation of players in the economy. That means less competition. That means less incentive to improve the value they provide.
Seems pretty clear to me that shopping with Amazon makes things worse for everyone in the long run.
Worth mentioning that Google has the same tax in Google Maps.
It is bad for the same reasons that the Amazon Tax mentioned in the post is bad…
Many times I search for a restaurant like McDonalds and the top result won’t be the one nearest to me…it will be a sponsored result for one that is farther away from me.
Pretty wild that Google does this. It’s bad for people. It’s bad because instead of picking the best choice to be the top, Google is showing a worser choice for money.
The same reason why this blog mentions that the Amazon Tax is bad.
This assumes that people only (or at least) mostly depend on Amazon's search results' ordering to decide which products to buy. This is not true, at least not for everyone. I, e.g., visit review websites like Wirecutter to decide. Something tells me I'm not the only one.
lol a customer literally types in “Seth Godin” on the internet and gets to the product. But for some reason Amazon sponsored ads is a toll booth BLOCKING the merchant from meeting the customer unless the merchant pays 1 dollar???
How exactly is Amazon preventing the customer from meeting the merchant? What is the precise mechanism?
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place)"
I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.
Yes. Technically, there are situations where the air fryer which is best for you and the air fryer that makes Amazon the most money are the same. However, with the number of airfryers on Amazon it seems safe to assume this is a rare coincidence.
Only very tangentially related of course, but for all of that money going into search/ads/targeting, etc., searching 'shirt without stripes' on amazon today still returns shirts with stripes.
> Advertisement serves to increase purchase of the inferior product.
> The best product, which previously didn't require ads [on Amazon] now must pay Amazon to compete for eyeballs.
Advertisement, when successful, increases the purchasing of any product, generally. That the best product is subject to this effect and competition has nothing to do with Amazon or technology.
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse."
I think the point of this piece is that advertising ruins platforms. Maybe so but Amazon is hardly the first platform to be ruined by it. The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus.
Subway platforms are filled with ads and force us to think about upcoming sales and broadway shows.
Television is full of ads and makes us think about all kinds of things we don't care about.
Restaurant menus advertise the items at the top of the menu to the detriment of the items in small print down below.
Memes of all kinds live or die by their attention fitness. If a book, play, or video game fails to get enough attention it dies, goes out of print, never makes it to broadway, and never gets ported to the new system. So if there is a way to cheat the attention system by paying a little money to push the thing in front of a few more eyeballs, makers and publishers are gonna do it.
Advertising is fundamentally un democratic because it assumes an imbalance of power - the power of those who control the publishing, the power those who can pay more.
> The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus.
this is really bad comparison
a subway platform ad doesn't dictate the way consumers use the subway.
a restaurant does not monitor the effectiveness of the ads in their menus, analyse their industry and rip off their product with an in-house brand (amazon basics)
amazon is not a marketplace, it is a surveillance platform built to allow amazon to take ownership of more and more markets
to say this is just a problem with ads is defeatist instead getting real tangible change
> If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
At least ads give the sellers a chance to compete for eyeballs 'legitimately'. The same marketing budget will not just vaporize if there is no ad space. It will be spent on fake reviews and even fake customers.
People who hate ads don't realize buying ads is the least evil way to compete for customers' attention.
I moved from the US to Australia recently, and Amazon isn’t really a thing here. Yes, it exists, and it is heavily marketed, but the range available in the store is at a guess less than 1% of what’s available in the US store. I occasionally go to amazon.com.au to look for things, have the same issue having to wade through irrelevant slop in the search results, find nothing suitable, and leave.
And then I do what it seems most Australians still do — go to a mall, or visit a specialty retailer, or use a specialty retailer’s clunky website and find exactly the thing I need and order it there and get it a few days later.
It’s quite refreshing to go out on the shopping streets or to the malls, and see many people out and about shopping. Likewise, the staff in stores are well-informed and helpful, and make the shopping experience pleasant and efficient.
Amazon is why we can’t have nice shopping experiences in the US.
I can't comment on the economics of it but amazon search is awful, and I think it's by design, not just by design though.
I was recently searching for some draw runners of a certain fixed size. Just cheap ones for some drawers I'm making for a workbench.
Found some cheap ones but not the correct length, but it made me realise something; If I sorted by price low to high the cheap ones did not show on any of the results pages. Amazon was purposefully showing me more expensive products.
I took some info from the cheap ones, searched for that, and the ones I wanted showed up in the search.
I wonder if anyone has trawled all of Amazon, and made a better search tool that doesn't try to rip anyone off?
Anyway, I am starting to find products cheaper outside of Amazon, including p&p.
Isn't it funny that marketers are usually the first people to complain about paying for marketing?
FWIW - I agree with the premise of the article, but I have to say - the reason these types of practices are acceptable in American culture is exactly because of prominent "marketing gurus".
Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right?
I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to target a query, they'll eventually need to target a vector and its neighborhood, and there will be some greater opacity facing advertisers trying to match "middle-income US users shopping for airfryers who have product height limits posed by kitchen upper cabinets" or something.
Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.
Well same people had expected self-service restaurants, self-pay terminals will cause no tip. And even more fun future robotic servers can just work without expecting/asking for tips.
Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".
I'd believe that if this article wasn't an obvious counter example to this.
People go where the mindshare is. It doesn't matter if its ad-ridden drivel and slop, it just needs to be popular.
The number of people who use OpenAI's products because "ai == chatgtp [sic]" in their minds is immense. Just like how to a ton of people, "online shopping == amazon".
I'm not arguing Amazon or OpenAI will always have this role, but while they have that the benefits of this position is immense.
and what stops the amazons of the world from paying the ai provider, and getting your ai to buy from them instead of the best deal? How are you going to check and verify you got the best deal?
In the recent past, there was a browser extension called "Honey", which purported to find and apply the best coupon code for you when you online shopped. Turned out they were actually (amongst other things), in cahoots with the shops by ensuring that you get only a modest discount, rather than the best available coupons (and this was paid for by the shop).
I have no doubt this will work out even less well than your typical SEO marketing spam site in the offering the best choice for you. AIs recommendations will be those of the highest bidder. Which will also be the lowest quality product they can get away with.
Haha, that's the classic thing with platforms that have demand aggregation. They extract a lot of stuff. DTC, Telehealth, all these things end up paying Meta and Google a large fraction of their revenue. Same with Stripe et al. The idea is to take a rake on all spending. It puts you in an unfathomably strong position. It's why Visa and Mastercard are such good businesses.
To get something in front of someone you need to do some work. These guys have the people so they charge you to show it to them. I'm realistically not going off Amazon. If you want to list the ebook on your website maybe I'll buy it there, but if you do a physical copy your 'tax' is going to Shopify. That's how it is.
If you are living in Germany I can not recommend https://geizhals.de/ enough. It is "just" a price comparision website, but it features most relevant online stores for me, annd more importantly their filters are just amazing and allow you to find products extremly efficient.
lots of people here defending amazon blindly seem to be unaware of the full picture of how amazon ads works in the context of the marketplace.
the point is that, if airfryer B is rival of A, and B buys ads (to let amazon show B ahead of A even if they searched for A), and A doesn't buy ads, then if B resorts to marketing to lower the quality just enough to compete, then all the quality focus of A will not end up increasing their sales.
more importantly, to have a good view on which products are good which one are the best is not available inside of amazon that easily. reusing sku, tricking people into buying inferior ones does not impact amazon in any way since return costs are paid by the fba vendor, or seller.
I'm sure that's very annoying for A Inc. It's probably more annoying than the slotting fee they paid Target, or the wholesale discount Walmart demanded, because "we only have room on the shelf for 3 brands" feels like more of a real constraint than "only 3 brands can be the top 3 search results".
Is it worse for me as a consumer? I'm not convinced.
Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
Even without the ads, Amazon search is abysmal. It seems to ignore half the words you enter. I often resort to using Google or ChatGPT to find items on Amazon which I know are there, but which their search box doesn't surface.
I searched for "cayenne" and accidentally bought the hot pepper product that came up which was not cayenne.
After going mildly buckwild on amazon after 3 years of not ordering a single thing (after a move to the country) I let the free month of prime I was using expire. This, and the counterfeit product I got (and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded) was decisive. I'll try again in 5 years.
> and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded
anecdata and all, but i've had the exact opposite experience - I've never spent more than a couple of minutes getting a refund, and it's always been less time and effort than returning something to a B&M store.
I imagine most readers haven't tried tiktok shop (or similar Chinese consumer shopping platforms).
ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective.
Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chinese EV ban).
He will likely be successful in doing this and allow the US to slide further into modern technological irrelevancy at his own benefit.
I have used this shop, but I do not agree that the experience is a good one. It is abysmal -- the standard for tiktok shop / aliexpress / temu is to offer you all sorts of "deals" that never actually apply. "Oh, you picked this item? Pick another four items and all of them are FREE!!! FREE!!! Also you have to buy a fifth one. Oh, and this only activates once you've spent more that $100. FREE!! FREE!!!"
Way worse than Amazon because at least Amazon is just showing you products and telling you how much they cost.
Its hard to pin down specifically. As a general rule: When I land on the homepage of the TikTok shop, without touching my screen I _generally_ see something that I am interested in buying. Its like it predicts what I am there to search for, and its quite accurate.
On the Amazon homepage that has never happened. It usually just shows some banner ad for prime day, new amazon tv show/movie, then maybe 4 little thumbnails of the last product I searched for or whatever. I have to initiate the shopping experience, I have to pique my own purchasing interest.
I’ve bought some stuff off there and can tease out some aspects, though they may be after the fact rationalizations of subconscious effects.
The first is price. The stuff is cheap, as in so cheap I know it will be terrible and I still sort of don’t care. It’s $2, if I only use it twice I got my moneys worth.
That makes it super easy to hit Buy without thinking much.
The second is that they appear to target verticals that don’t have a natural ceiling to sales. I only need one microwave, so they won’t sell me that. They do sell a lot of apparel, decorations, toys for adults (crappy 3D displays, not dildos), stuff where you don’t think “eh, I already have one though”.
The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really. Swipe to next video, see it’s an ad, hit buy, confirm Apple Pay pop up, scroll to next video. You can decide you want something, buy it, and be on your next video in 15 seconds. It’s so fast it almost blurs the line where I’m not sure if I’d call it shopping or entertainment.
The last is that they’re really good at luring consumers to start selling on there. The ads for stuff tend to be sort of home made and low quality, which makes it seem attainable for your average person. That tends to mean a huge selection. I had a buddy that randomly decided to sell stickers on there just based on watching other people do it (no idea how that went, I didn’t ask)
> The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really.
No trolling: This prose is wonderful. It reads like something out of a sequel to the film "A Scanner Darkly".
I hate videos when shopping. Videos are not skimmable. I don’t want to watch and listen to a salesperson sell the product to me. I want at least a modicum of individual agency and choice. I already skip all product videos on Amazon. I hate the product images too as they have become too salesy and they sometimes no longer even show important facts printed on the packaging itself (like the ingredient list or Nutrition Facts / Supplement Facts).
Fair; While I can only speak to TikTok shop (as its the only one I've interacted with), the videos typically take the place where product photos would be on the product page. A swipe dismisses it and its replaced with the product photos. The core browsing experience does not show videos in lieu of product photos from what I have seen.
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum.
I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad.
Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
I’m surprised that anyone would love Amazon so much that they resort to using third-party search so they can continue buying from Amazon. Rather than just shopping elsewhere!
There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.
Eh, for me it's not about love, it's about no other retailers carrying what I want, at a price point I'll pay, with an easy return policy and easy checkout. I'm willing to put up with a lot of crap to find that, apparently.
To be clear, when I do use LLM for search, I don't limit it to one site.
It’s wild. I was trying to find a cheap bookshelf with a specific style the other day. Firstly, I couldn’t filter by exact width. It autogenerated a width range (like 24-30”) which was different on subsequent searches and several inches away from what I wanted.
Second, I found a product I liked but was the wrong size. As far as I could tell, they can’t even show you recommended similar products. They show you what other people clicked on or bought in the same order. But not just actually similar products in the same style.
I looked at well over 1000 listings when looking for a new desk. The filters are sick joke. This was pre-llm, today I'd write something to scrape the results and parse the product pages/images to filter out the crap.
This plus the login-walled reviews is unfortunate because once I stopped buying from Amazon I'd continue to go there to browse before buying elsewhere.
They also keep making it more annoying to even get to and read the reviews. It feels like it gets more hidden at the bottom of the page every few months. What a shame! Imagine how useful it could be.
Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.
This is simply, a monopoly. Whatever mechanism they came up with to squeeze the final dollars out of the system, such a system would exist because they can.
Similarly, this is also why Google stopped enforcing trademarks years ago. It allows more people to bid on terms, increases competition, increases CPCs & of course pads their bottom line.
Same reason why the top ad on Google when you search for a brand is for the brand itself -- "brand bidding" is a thing, and if you don't bid on ads for your own brand, a competitor will. If Google can do it why not Amazon!
I do not understand why sellers accept this practice. I'd assume it would run afoul of some trademark law but the distinct lack of lawsuits indicates that either the legal grounds are shaky... or the sellers themselves find some advantage in it.
The income tax in UK has this quirk: once you fall near the top tax bracket, you retrospectively lose all tax-free allowances you could have availed, had you not fallen in the top tax bracket.
Likewise, once corporations blow past a revenue cap, they shouldn't be eligible for lower rate of corporate tax. If the US is any cautionary tale (it always is), it's a moral imperative not to let corporations get too big. Letting corporations grow big and still avail tax cuts, is like feeding your own cancer.
In reality though it isn't implemented as you described. In reality it is merely that there is a 62% marginal rate from 100k to 100k + 2x the personal allowance.
They do this with sole traders who face a £14k (~$20k) slab tax bill (VAT) if they go from £85k to £85,001 (~$100k). The outcome has been near total depletion of skill tradesman "mate" apprenticeships. Since such people (not being totally stupid) take 3 months off per year or work 4 days per week and turn down jobs.
it's very attractive to try and build a progressive tax system that swings too far the other way too. Economically some sort of tax free base and a flat rate is the best but politically it's way better to attack here and carve out these exemptions... the biggest winner is tax prep software.
The great Bezos said ones and people, companies, stock market loved it. Now new CEO is noticing Amazon customers also have some margin and hence more opportunity for Amazon.
Lower and lower S/N on the internet.... and businesses adding to the N so they can charge for the S. If enough become aware of this, they will vote with their $$ and Amazon (et al) will lose market share. But sadly the TicToc generation doesn't seem to notice :-()
if your highest performing ad is against searches for literally the title of your book, isn't that a signal that you don't need to buy ads? people are searching for your book. they will buy it whether you advertise or not. so why by the ad?
this is framed as amazon doing something wrong, but it sounds like what's actually happening is that his marketer is wasting money. of course amazon is going to accept money if you give it to them for the things they're already doing for free. why shouldn't they?
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
Theoretically. Amazon doesn't give a shit about well being or enrichment of it's employees. Every single one of the them. They tried to squeeze the productivity and since the Stock has been doing well, many employees have made a reasonable money. But forget the well being or profit sharing aspects with the employees.
> paying Amazon a dollar to show you an ad for the book you searched in the first place.
This is the worst part.
Google Ads are the same. I pay about $2 per click for my EXACT PRODUCT NAME search, otherwise 6 other competitor ads are shown on top of google search before the actual results
I'm having trouble understanding how this differs from traditional ads - even pre-Internet...? Didn't manufacturers pay to get premium shelf space in a store?
In the author’s specific case of books, publishers always paid ‘coop marketing’ dollars to booksellers to get ‘face out’ placement on shelves, ‘end cap’ positioning where copies of the book would be positioned on the aisle-facing shelves used to entice people into browsing a section of the store, as well as more for table placements and window features. And that’s on top of just having to discount the price deep enough to get the seller to buy in stock of the book in the first place, as well as further eating margin reductions to induce sellers to offer discounts.
All these same incentives are at work in supermarket aisles and big box stores, shaping which products you see and are offered at what price. You think if you walk into Best Buy and ask them to show you laptops, the one they push you to look at is going to be the ‘best’ on offer? Or is it perhaps the one which is set up with the best sales staff commission this month?
Distribution channels have never been neutral champions of the consumer.
There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store.
Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences.
If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it.
Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens.
Only Amazon knows how many affiliate links lead to actual sales, how many ebook pages are actually read, what the CTR on ads really is, and so on.
> There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store.
> Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences.
20+ years ago the exact same accusations were leveled against Walmart.
I still don't see the difference.
> If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it.
Amazon is giving many people a platform they had no other hope of having. Years ago, for a while, I got deep into Amazon selling. An average Joe who is a full time employee can quickly set up a business, get some manufacturing contracts in
China, and start selling on Amazon.
In the old days, that Joe would never be allowed on Walmart's shelves.[1] So it's equally true with Walmart: That average Joe would not be able to get a human to help him, because the humans would exclude him to begin with. Amazon is giving the average Joe more opportunity than they ever had. We're merely criticizing them for not giving those kinds of sellers great service.
Even for those who could get into Walmart - they made capricious decisions all the time that would impact your sales. If you were a small seller, you had no power over Walmart.
> Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens.
If the goal of your comment is to list all the reasons Amazon sucks - there's no need. I could write that list for you - I try not to buy from Amazon myself. The submission is specifically about their ads, as was my comment.
[1] Arguably, that's a good thing, and Amazon's lack of curation is one of the reasons I don't shop at Amazon, but it is besides the point here.
The article mentions that the "best" airfyer seller also has to place bids on their names / keywords, but I don't think there's a best, just like there's no best shoes. There are so many niches that exist in products — does it fit in a tight space, what's the shape, what's the air-frying technique, do the buttons work with oven mitts — so there are different bestsellers in each subcategory.
An idea I've played around with in the past is to have some sort of law that limits how much revenue a company can make from ads. For example, a law that says "A company cannot make more than 10% of its gross revenue from ads or selling customer data".
This kind of law would wreak havoc for certain companies (and content creators). However, just like prediction markets, ads distort and ruin the very thing they are trying to optimize.
That's one tax. The other tax is that companies raise their prices elsewhere so that they aren't lower than the list price on Amazon, because that would violate Amazon's policy.
In the product search results game, I imagine Google and Amazon will soon have competition from AI chatbots linking to product pages in response to user queries. Also, OpenAI is getting into ad business. Seems like that will add a different place where book publishers could run ads? They will also need to optimize their web pages to be useful to bots looking for information.
The point is that, because of their product’s merits, they would organically be the top ranked search result. But due to advertising, they have lost that spot and now either must give up sales or also advertise.
I understand the point. I simply argue that it's an ill-conceived point, based on various definitions of the word "entitled":
1. qualified for by right according to law
2. having a right to certain benefits or privileges
3. having a right or legitimate claim to something
No company is qualified for sales according to law, or has a right to sales, or has a legitimate claim on sales. Sales must be earned by besting the competition.
For a while Amazon was good at discovering new books to read. Nowadays my ad-blocker blocks everything except for the book I am directly navigating to from the page. No discovery of new books is happening for me there anymore.
Another place to discover new books was Goodreads. Bought and left to rot by Amazon.
Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either.
There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like?
But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail.
The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.
> The world would probably be a healthier place economically if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores and independent shops.
I don't know what you mean by that. I used to live in a tier 2 European city pre Internet and there were lots of things that were a pain to buy. We'd often have to check multiple stores. Specialty hobbies were served by one or two shops that you had to drive to. I remember having to take the train to a different city to buy a memory card for my computer. There was real consumer cost and societal cost.
The warehouse and online order model is economically a lot more efficient. The real question is what to do with the surplus it generates, make Bezos richer or something else?
Only a magically perfect network would do that. There's no force to "correct" food deserts.
OTOH, Amazon grocery delivery in cities does do a LOT toward reducing their impact on poor people (who are not-poor enough to pay for Amazon delivery) (which might be cheaper than bus tickets). Hate on Amazon and Bezos all you want; some good comes out of it.
I rarely order anything from Amazon these days, maybe once or twice a year. Everything feels like a rip-off or fake. I don't trust the search function at all. Nor do I trust the customer ratings. The only exception is if I buy from a brand I already know that has its own brand-shop, owned directly by the manufacturer.
Amazon is nearly worthless to find anything anymore. Same items repeated dozens to hundreds of times, with minor changes, but all pointing to the same item.
It's like GOogle when ads outweighed your search results. Amazon has become a garbage pit.
The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great.
It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.
This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.
This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.
Google ads work exactly the same way.
As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.
If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.
("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)
This is by far the most annoying thing about Amazon to me. They clearly are doing a disservice to their consumer with this. Many times I go straight to google to search for Amazon products, which leads to better results
And Apple. Unsurprisingly, the brand name of my app converts best, except Apple wants an outrageous $3 per click or something. Of course, I simply live with no ads and trust in people finding the correct download link if they want my app and not the competitor bidding for my brand keyword.
Respectfully, this is nonsense. The consumer experience I have is that Amazon sells products at lower prices with better quality, support, variety and transparency than pretty much every other store out there.
Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience.
If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t?
Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there.
Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel.
Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.
The real amazon tax is getting people to think shipping fees are part of the item, and causing one $5 cable+shipping to be $10. Three $5 cables and shipping is $30. tbh if amazon went up in smoke like wildberries I would not even flinch.
My current strategy is to skip ads and skip any name that is just a jumble of letters. But the garbage producers are getting so good with AI they can create entire websites with US addresses and pictures of buildings and employees and none of it is real.
Would love a similar post breaking down the rightmove (UK equivalent of zillow) tax.
Fortunately there is currently a court case against them that might help. I am also starting a #RightmoveHygiene campaign to encourage people to spend less time on there.
One could argue that Google Ads are jacking up the prices of hotels.
To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.
Sort by "Best Sellers" always on Amazon. "Featured" is driven by ads.
Also? Firefox with Ublock Origin blocks ads (but it's an endless cat and mouse game).
Closed amazon account when Bz decided to get into politics. I realize I can buy everything I need “in the real world” and thru manufacture websites directly. I do not miss it.
I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead
The only reason I have Prime these days is for the unlimited photo storage and then some extra storage for video. It’s hard to find a convenient and cost effective way to free my data.
I don't understand the "theft" or "stealing" angle here, other than as a clumsy rhetorical device. I can see an "unfair" angle, and the behavior is definitely bad for customers, but it's not theft. Theft and stealing are when someone unlawfully[1] takes something that belongs to you. But here, it's never established that whatever was taken ever belonged to either the consumer or the maker in the first place.
[1] The author tries to escape this requirement by calling it "legal theft" but that's an oxymoron.
In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...)
So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to bring it to my front door? I never got it.
And unfortunately for them... it keeps happening now?
Like every other package that gets delivered?!
(They always believe this, apparently... either that, or their agreement with their delivery insurance services must eat the cost).
I've more than gotten my muffler refunded now and they're none the wiser, so win win really!
I certainly hope so. GP implies that they are committing fraud to "stick it to the man". Nine times out of ten, this simply results in the man sticking it to us again.
I would be pretty surprised if Amazon insures their package delivery. Do you have a source for them using insurance?
Maybe when they use a 3rd party delivery service they can strongarm that service into eating the loss. But, where I am, Amazon is usually doing 1st party delivery.
(the reason I assume they don't is that a) they are big enough to eat any loss and b) losses happen at a pretty constant rate. So they would basically be paying an insurer $loss_amount * (1+insurer_margin) in premiums to immediately get payed back $loss_amount. not a great deal.)
Most likely they're sticking it to a delivery contractor. Amazon gets paid, you get your free stuff, and some working class stiff is peeing in a bottle driving a leased truck and not getting paid for their labor. Win win win, right?
Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases.
It's gone and confirmed and acknowledged by their support which made me take a screenshot of the popup where the card details are entered to confirm it. They in turned wanted to give me a 15€ gift card for the inconvenience and told them that I wasn't there asking for a gift card or discount and refused it.
So every single time you purchase with your credit card if you do not want your details to be saved, you have to MANUALLY go to your personal settings and remove the added card from your last purchase. Fucking amazing.
On top of that listings are overflowed with chinese brands and/or items that have no correlation to what I'm looking for.
Can someone suggest better alternatives here in Europe?
> The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.
"If you're not the customer, you're the product".
Well, Amazon actually did it. They made us the customer _AND_ the product. Hooray.
Like LOTS of other people, I, of course, use Amazon. But, more and more often... if I can find a product somewhere else within, say, 5-6%... I'll buy it that someplace else. Especially if that someplace else is actually a building I can walk into and inspect the thing I'm buying before I pay for it.
Shopping on Amazon is getting worse every day. How can it be good for Amazon in the long run that every time I buy something from their site, I actually have to spend time convincing myself that I'm not getting a knock-off product?
In the modern world, every single time money leaves my bank account I feel like I'm potentially being scammed. I hate it.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. This is no different than grocery stores selling shelf space. It is not at all like theft (morally wrong) or taxes (infamously inefficient). And if you don't do it, you go out of business since you aren't competitive with someone that does. It's sad that such obvious rage bait makes it to the top of hacker news.
I mean of course. It is a mom n pop store with just 3 trillion market cap. If they don't do 95 ads with 5 actual results, they'll be out of business by this weekend.
Huh, retail store has fixed amount of shelf space, it can't keep infinite variants, but Amazon has infinite real estate it can keep the exact item you search for on page 23 instead of page 1. Have same item appear 10 times on different pages/places in search, retail store can't do that.
It is like saying newspaper classified ads are same as Google ads. Not very good comparison.
I'm sympathetic to the points he makes. But it's hard to take it seriously when he makes his money selling marketing and he's complaining about cpc advertising. It's like if a horse breeder were complaining about cars
The word monopoly has lost all meaning online, it seems to just be synonymous now with 'successful business'.
You can cut Amazon out of your life tomorrow if you wanted. You could do it almost entirely with just Walmart.com if you wanted a dropin replacement.
If you only have one internet provider in your area, that's a monopoly, the cost of switching is essentially 'start an ISP'. Having to type in walmart.com does not make Amazon a monopoly.
I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
> And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
Sometimes the easy one to blame is also the right one to blame.
But I disagree though. Blaming human nature is much much easier. It means there is nothing we can do except give up and live with it.
In contrast, blaming the system means we can still change the system, and changing the system is extremely hard, especially when the rich and powerful have so much interest in keeping the system the way it is.
I think AWS still cares about customer trust, but Amazon retail abandoned that at least a decade ago. The ads are so high-margin compared to retail though (biggest profit center after AWS) that I don't expect them to change anything.
This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example.
What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.
One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.
I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.
I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.
It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned.
Amazon doesn't need to be so big and in so many industries. My pharmacy doesn't also need to be a movie studio. My cloud provider doesn't also need to be a self publishing business. It distorts too many things.
You should do what I do: look for someplace else to buy from first. Amazon has "everything" - if you can find it. However there are usually small sellers of that niche (often niche.com) where they know something about the product and will direct your to the best one without adds. The smaller/weirder the niche the more likely this seller is to be helpful. You get to support "the little guy", and get a good product for a good price. Even if Amazon is cheaper, the smaller store is still the better value because you get a good product.
Sometimes. Larger companies will not do that since it makes the places that sell most of their things mad to have to compete with the manufacture. (or sometimes they intentionally price such that others can undercut them).
Mostly I don't do this because I don't know which company makes the one I want. An independent third party that knows the product and sells several different versions from different companies can help me select which one is best for me. This is a valuable service - when you can find it.
The ads make sense in capitalism. Without the described effect products would never change. Payment for ads ensures discovery works in adversarial free market.
The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.
I'm sorry, but how does a business writer lead an article with garbage like this:
Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue.
Is it revenue or profit? They are not the same thing.
Amazon’s decision making is beholden to growing its share price and the trite careerist ambitions of (8 reports per
manager) ^ (5 layers of management) = ~32768 middle
managers. It’s destined to become a cesspool for consumers. The only question is whether there will be any other options left by the time most people realize.
No wonder Amazon sued Perplexity to forbid agents on their site, agents could cut through the crap and find what users wanted instead of what Amazon peddles. They even won the suit.
I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.
Not using Amazon (in light of geopolitical events and quite frankly, just not liking the way they do business or Jeff Bezos (as he presents himself to the world)) has been a net positive.
There was a time it was good and convenient and the worst of what they are wasn't quite so obvious but that time has passed.
Insinuating that there is one "best product" that Amazon magically knows is the best is quite an assumption. The best product might be completely different for different people and different depending on the time for the same person. Plus there are always new products being introduced and products being discontinued. I think we are mis assuming ill intent a little. Second issue is the assumption that there is always a fixed pie of demand for a product, when a new great product comes out more people will purchase from a category, its never fixed completely. This sounds like cope for book sales being lower than expected if we are being honest.
I'm honestly at the stage where I'm finding the same product but cheaper in the local retailer. I don't mean a dollar here or there, I mean a full 30% cheaper. Particularly most things food related. I used to be putting in an order weekly, I now haven't in almost three months.
IIRC this was talked about in Cory Doctorow's Enshittification book.
Here's my bookmarklet to get rid of sponsored results, it's survived a couple years:
Grocery stores and department stores have played games with what items they stock and where they stock it (location on the shelf is hugely important in a grocery store) for decades, it's just better hidden than the 'sponsored' text next to Amazon paid ads. It's infinitely easier to make a product and get it available on Amazon.com than it ever was to get your product into a grocery store.
>They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
As others have pointed out, without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.
> without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.
If you are Amazon, this is essentially just the multi-armed bandit problem, at it is not particularly difficult. You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it.
>You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it.
You just handwaved away the hardest problem. What is 'enough'? What if the first user failed to plug it in and left a 1/5? Or liked it but left a 3/5 anyways? And what if you show it too many people so now rebranding products and just dropshipping them takes off?
I feel at least in major urban areas Amazon’s delivery network is efficient enough that they have to artificially delay non-Prime orders. I order from Amazon only occasionally, and while sometimes there’s actual step-by-step tracking I’ll usually see no movement at all for 3+ days, and suddenly the item has dispatched from the warehouse and it is reaching my house in an hour.
Last week I searched for a "Eufy S350" security camera on Amazon. Instead of search results, Alexa for Shopping took over the entire screen, proceeded to tell me that the Eufy S350 doesn't exist, and then recommended a Eufy vacuum cleaner.
This feels comical to me today, but I can imagine a near future where paid AI ads gaslit you into believing that the product you searched for is vastly inferior to the product AI "recommends".
Long time Amazon seller/brand here (and ex-academic/game theorist) -- it's a little more complicated if you think about the various parties' incentives, but yeah we have a half-assed market equilibrium that sucks for everyone.
Amazon as the marketplace facilitator has an interesting job to run:
1) It wants customers to get exactly what they want (as measured by the minimal amount of clicking/scrolling/time it takes for a customer to hit the landing page -> complete shopping). This is mostly customer-centric.
2) It wants to promote as much competition as it can between products and brands so that no seller dominates the market. This is... mildly customer-centric so big sellers can't rest on their laurels, and mostly self-serving (so no single seller/brand can gain enough power to threaten Amazon).
3) Amazon has to strike a balance of #1 and #2 so that there's some opportunity for new entrants to enter any product space. Back in the days they structured search so that some percentage of results would be new sellers and products, and new products would get some amount of sessions to prove they convert within a certain statistical distribution to land a certain rank (BSR). Note the rise of alphabet soup Amazon brands is partially because they allowed for disposable brands that could be black-hatted, and partially because for a few years these sellers were just generating tons of new brands to share new SKU real estate on search results (so when you searched for "small kitchen colander" or what not, you'd find the same product being sold by 10 sockpuppet sellers occupying 10 search spaces, taking result space away from the other sellers).
But what if they can get everyone to partially pay for #3? Enter ads, where basically new and old brands pay to play for eyeballs on Amazon.
So if you think about it, Amazon is a search problem where you wanna push results such that the expected value of the results pushed yield the highest expected value, something along the lines of: Expected Value (EV) of your product = [your sales price] x [your product's conversion rate in the past X days] x [some confidence level of said conversion rate] - [returns] + [whatever other Amz secret sauce] + [Amazon PPC]
Amazon can get people to pay for their eyeballs, swap some seller blackhat tactics for others, and more or less keep OK results. So that's Amazon's end.
As an established seller -- I know my product converts at X%, so as long as the math works out where I spend $Y/click, expect it to convert at X%, and my profit Z > Y * X it's what I do (and the tax I pay), and I move that up and down depending on my inventory situation. If possible, yes, I would pass some of that down to price raises as long as the market's willing to bear it, so I can make a minimum margin requirement off my Amazon channel (which is the lowest, compared to my D2C website or through offline B&M channels, but I do so because my biggest volume is on-Amazon).
As a customer... yeah the default search results are "good enough" for the 80-20 crowd; the convenience, ease-to-checkout, and 1-2 day shipping wins them over. As a "nerdy" customer who likes researching products to get the best one, I used to research via online reviews and reddit (most of which are gamified in their own ways)... but now I use AI (ChatGPT, *not* Amazon's Alexa Shopping because it's not great) and mostly call it a day.
This seems generally like the US corporate playbook. Create a product, monopolize it and milk the monopoly. SpaceX, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, Facebook, Google…
Whats going to be hilarious is if brick and mortar companies become popular again because of the painful U.I., scammy companies, and broken search of Amazon.
That's just not going to happen. You have to go out in the rain or heat, pay for parking, maybe not find what you want, pay 30% more than online, so online still has advantages.
What baffles me is that e-commerce sites all tend to get worse with time. The moment a site I like turns into a marketplace, I know it will only go downhill.
Must be some MBA thing. Must maximise revenue in every possible way. I have still no idea why the local white goods (and everything else) seller decided it was smart idea to pollute their own product search by becoming marketplace. I am going to you because well you are not that horrible and actually have store near me.
Enshittification for everyone that comes into contact with a corporation run with only profit (and profit growth) in mind.
One would be tempted to think that doing things different and actually providing a good service for consumers, sellers, etc would be a multibillion dollar business, but somehow it seems like it isn't.
> When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options.
Sure, this is probably accurate in many situations.
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far [for Seth Godin's new book, The Knot] is the search "Seth Godin The Knot".
But not that one. If you cut spending on that ad to zero, you would lose an immeasurably small number of sales. The ad is high yield because people who search for "Seth Godin The Knot" are already planning to buy Seth Godin's The Knot. Letting other people display ads on top of that search won't dissuade them.
Large enough companies always set up rent mechanisms.
> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.
The stealing is, of course, much more fundamental than the search tax.
I am reminded of the saying by 19th-century French social thinker Proudhon, who said: "La propriete? C'est le vol!" ("Property? Why, that's theft!") - he was describing interactions which, at that time, it was conceivably possible to manage collectively for the public benefit - taken over by individuals, institutions and mechanisms economically benefits a small few to the detriment of the majority (farmers and laborers). The Amazon product search example is different, but then, also not so different. I mean, it's just search - and the blog post author knows it could just be implemented reasonably so that people who want to find his book find his book. Then suddenly, Amazon put a fence around that field and demands you pay a part of your annual yield for it to allow you to farm that field, and not drive you off by force. And that metaphor is probably quite clear to you even though there are no farmers, fields or fences in the blog post.
Amazon's not stealing that money from its stockholders, which is who
These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
It's completely insane to me that the first search for Okta in the app store isn't the actual Okta app, it's a half-page ad for something that could easily be confused with the Okta app
substitute for literally any business name
Sure, I know the right one to click on, if I'm in a sound state of mind. What if I'm sleepy? Stressed? 65+ years old?
App Store is a wasteland, I don't think there are more than 100 good apps in millions. All want in-app-purchase, none is fair to give me an upfront price. I don't want for example my kids being bugged to buy apps that cost $100/week.
The amazon tax holds nothing to the credit card tax. Credit cards have been driving prices up for decades with their behind the scenes fees that are passed onto the customer. All for "convenience" of the right to buy something because now they have created a near mandatory purchasing system duopoly.
> It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks.
This assertion lacks evidence. An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself. The ad will earn you a click-through to the product, but buyers will begin to back out instead of following through with a purchase. Ad purchases cannot overcome insufficient revenue - it won't be profitable long-term.
Yes, Amazon has a problem with vendors buying good reviews as well. It doesn't overcome a high number of poor reviews, or a high number of returns.
> And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.
Reeks of a conspiracy theory. Most customers simply don't have the time or energy to research any more than the top handful of results. Only a rare person goes 10 pages deep into the search results. Organic search results will produce less traffic when people don't even look at them. But that's not evidence in and of itself that the organic search results were nerfed in some way.
I hate to remind people of the basic truth about modern Amazon, but here goes: the vast majority of the inventory is made in China and the exact same product can be found at a tiny, tiny fraction of the Amazon price on AliExpress and similar sites. The value that Amazon adds is their logistic network that can deliver to domestic US addresses in a day or two, compared to weeks. The difference in price between Amazon and AliExpress justifies sellers spending enormous sums on ads and review purchases, because even if they do sell garbage on Amazon, enough people bought it at such ridiculous margins that the seller can tear down the product with the bad reviews and high return rate and re-offer it under a new brand with the same ad and review purchase strategy and still make a profit. But the person to blame for that is not Amazon, and it's not the seller, it's the fool who decides to pay the ridiculous price compared to the AliExpress price.
Books are one of the categories where they aren't printed in China, they're not sold on AliExpress, and searching for "seth godin the knot" returns the actual correct listing as the first organic search result. So I'm not sure why the author brings his book up as evidence. He might do better by reminding his publisher that "selling on Amazon" is not a homogenous experience and they ought to reconsider flushing money down the drain on advertisements they don't need.
> An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself.
Yeah but at the time when I buy it it's gonna have thousands of 5 star reviews, and the images themselves will be the shiniest most beautiful garbage ever seen by mankind.
Amazon has the most useless search I know.
Also, idk who clicks those 'Sponsored' results, but for me they are an automatic pass. But then again Amazon is such a scumbag company that uses its own brands as a weapon to make sellers pay to be visible.
cancelled our Prime membership a year ago (after nearly 10 years) and went from buying most non-food things on Amazon to occasionally buying small random items. We broke our addiction to 1 or 2-day shipping, and we're just fine.
It's gotten ridiculous in the last month with behavior I've never seen before. If I want to buy a specific book I type <author name> <title> into the search bar. The search bar even helps me complete the entry, and then a page shows with a choice of several books with my chosen book at the top.
Fine. Except now after one second, the whole page changes and then there's only one book on the page and it has nothing to do with the book I actually searched for.
So obviously they know about the book I want because they just showed it to me but then they make it disappear in favor of one I don't want but which I presume is one the publisher paid them to show me.
My workaround is to search on Amazon in a private tab so they don't know who I am. In that case the book I want shows up and I can click on it and get its URL and then paste it into the original Amazon window where I'm already logged in, and I can order it. Except I don't, because I'm so disgusted by this I go directly to the publisher's website and order it there.
This is ridiculous.
Amazon is throwing money on the floor with this behavior and they're probably just begging for a restraint of trade class-action lawsuit.
> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.
People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
You're completely ignoring the fact that the majority of people do not expect a search result ranking to be influenced by bidding. Yes it happens, but unless the item is labeled as an ad, most people will infer value that does not exist. And this is wrong. The only reason they appear in the search is so that they do not look like ads.
There's plenty of places to advertise and the best for the consumer is for transparency to exist in the first place.
Amazon is a two-sided marketplace. Why should their obligation in search be 100% to one side?
Even for the buyer, there are second order consequences if you remove the ability for sellers to effectively sell. If sellers can't effectively ramp, they're going to turn to other platforms. If new sellers can't compete on Amazon, prices will increase and diversity of options will go down.
I'm not saying ads in search are a hard necessity in every platform. I'm just asking people to think through the whole issue before making snap judgments because ads are annoying to them.
You take the money you would've spent on ads and instead offer a lower price than the current leader to make up for the buyer's uncertainty toward your product. This lets a search algorithm organically decide that you are among the top (risk-neutral) value contenders. Once that uncertainty disappears, you will have a higher value product and can therefore command a higher price.
Put another way, the buyer uncertainty about your product actually, concretely makes your product worse. They don't know whether your thing will fail. The don't know whether you will go out of business if they need support. All else equal, either your product is not the best product, or you need to offer a lower price. Ads are a way to instead just pay someone to straight up lie (i.e. defraud) and say it's recommended when it's not.
It's a nice idea and I can see it working in some cases.
I'll be the first to admit I don't know the specifics, but I imagine in some cases, it's economically prohibitive to lower the price by such an amount that it makes up for the uncertainty in a typical search algorithm.
Then your product is actually worse for the customer. It's nice that you want it to be better, but it's not in a meaningful way that you can't just handwave away. Risk carries a cost.
Another possibility would be for the marketplace to be better able to load information about your product so you could provide some more information and reduce that uncertainty. E.g. that you use different (better) materials in your construction. Or you could work with the marketplace to purchase or demonstrate some kind of insurance policy to mitigate support concerns. Basically allow those unknown pieces of information to be discoverable by search engines and the customer. If the market has more knowledge, then if you have a better product, it should organically rank better. Either way, ads do literally nothing to benefit the buyer since they provide zero information (actually they provide a negative piece of information: someone paid for you to see something, so you can assume it's not in your interest to see it).
The article isn't an attack on advertising to bring awareness of your product to an unaware market; it's an attack on being made to pay for a customer who has specifically asked for your product to be shown your product.
Unless your _ads_ are going to compete with your competitors' then that's not going to be effective. Ironically middlemen are probably solution here, you'd be better off going to trade shows and working with department stores that sell air fryers, they'll want to turn your lower cost into their higher margin.
> People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
This is a lazy strawman and not what the author of the post argued for.
> It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
Then maybe contribute to the dialog on that front. The article did so more than your comment setting up a strawman.
I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."
You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.
If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.
I have to agree with OP, this phrase specifically reveals it isn't a good take:
> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place
Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.
right, you've spent most of your capital on product, and now you're competing with everyone else on $/ad.
Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.
Say you invent a crap product, and shove ads under my nose to bug me while I want to buy a decent product. Why should I accept that?
Just get your products reviewed by trusted reviewers, if you can budge them maybe you deserve a bit of attention from us. Someone who has a stake in being trusted for their fair reviews.
The problem is we aren’t in a world of more “reasonable” advertising. What we see deployed now are basically weapons-grade manipulation systems, and upstarts do not have equal access to the arsenal. So yeah, they need to get the word out, but they can’t even do that! The big dogs get better, more privileged access.
Should Dr Pepper have to spend a dollar per purchase to be the top result when you search for "Dr Pepper"? Is it good for the customer that when they search Dr Pepper and they stopped paying for the placement ads the first page is no longer Dr Pepper but instead "UUBUOI SODA 100% SODA COLA POP PEPPER 7 UP〖1L〗〖2L〗〖12OZ〗〖500ML〗" AND "FUUOYAY YUM YUM SPARKLE FIZZ 致癌神水"
While this isn't necessarily the reality for sodas, this is the reality for darn near every thing I look to buy off Amazon.
Soda is actually not a bad example to disprove your hypothesis. It's just one example of where your own health and finances will be better off if you ignore advertisers entirely.
and exclusively paying attention to what doctors say:
38% of people also think opposing fascism is very unfavourable according to that. Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
> Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
You’re talking about Amazon’s actual customers here. Is Amazon supposed to ignore the opinion of their customers for the opinion of some commenter on HN?
Is this not the direct result of consumers being too lazy to price match and price discover? Amazon still has the ability to sort price: low to high. You also still have the ability to ask your friends and family what air fryer they purchased. If the average consumer just implicitly trusts Amazon such that they buy whatever shows up first, that’s not Amazon’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault.
I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.
Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
As much as I'd like to agree with the article's point and am critical of Amazon etc etc, you lost me here. $35k cash bonus for every employee does not pass the smell test. I'm sure the delivery driver who famously needs to pee into a bottle because they can't afford a toilet break would love such a bonus, but they don't get one.
This makes me doubt everything in the article. Which is really a shame because such articles are necessary. But you need to keep your facts straight, otherwise you are completely disqualifying yourself from any serious discourse. At least for me.
There is enough to criticise with Amazon. Just keep to the things that are true.
The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions. They're employees of contract companies that put the Amazon logo on their vans.
But that aside, what part do you disagree so strongly with?
> The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions.
Of course hair splitting can make things "technically true" but that doesn't make this any more suitable to a serious debate in which the other side is playing dirty and the main argument against that is that dirty is bad. That argument loses its sting if itself embedded in dirt.
Fair, but how easy is it to in that case mistakenly read it like that?
It's not the only questionable figure in Seth's post. He also drops an ad for his new book within 2.5 short paragraphs. While criticising ad practices.
He writes "if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place". Who is entitled to ...what exactly? Maybe you could argue the best air frier should get the top search result spot. Already calling that "entitled" is a stretch though, let alone being entitled to a sale.
He writes "Who ends up paying the more than $50 billion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sellers. Sellers can’t make heartfelt donations for long. It’s you." It's economics 101 that such overhead, just like taxes, is ultimately split between buyer and seller. Profits go down and paid prices go up. Seth surely knows this (if not then he should not be blogging about economics) but chooses to give you the simplified version to push a narrative. Which is sad. Again, there is enough to legitimately criticise.
I don't want to keep listing more of this, but it's really not feeling particularly honest discourse if you bend things while claiming a moral highground. Cause that makes you lose it.
Unless your goal as an author is just to fuel outrage, no matter cost. Sure, an option, but not part of a serious debate then. Which, again, is a shame.
> Fair, but how easy is it to in that case mistakenly read it like that?
I had no trouble parsing it, but then again, I'm used to people whining about how they're getting screwed because their employer made so $1M/employee but they're not getting paid $1M.
Otherwise - yeah, I was not impressed with the article. Ads are acting just like ads always have. There is nothing special he could point out about Amazon's ads.
I see the exact same thing on Play Store, and I think Google is outright complicit in fraud. The top result when you search for an app, even if by exact name, is always, literally 100% of the time, not the app you are looking for, but some other ad-infested knockoff spyware shit whose developer paid Google to be placed before the real thing.
No regulations -> fraud and scams
Expecting that the rich will do the right thing out of their good hearts is not just naive but actively damaging for society.
I saw a google authenticator copy (using the old icon but named Authenticator) about two weeks ago. It was the top result but an ad and not by Google. Sad I didn't screenshot it, couldn't find it when searching Google Authenticator again.
Yes, theres a similar one for Microsoft Authenticator which obviously tries to con you into installing it by also advertising that it allows you to "sign in to your Microsoft accounts".
It annoys me so much that every authenticator is just called authenicator these, days. like its google authenicator, or microsoft authenicator, not just authenticator
Same on iOS App Store. Search for “pocket cast” and you see “Pocket FM”. Search for “notion” and you will see “Notix: AI note taker”.
I was using someone's computer who didn't have ad-block and this is rampant with Google's web search too.
It's unreal to me that you can search for a specific doctor's name in a specific town and end up seeing a sponsored result that uses the doctor's name in the ad's title but it's not the real office, instead it's someone else entirely.
Ha truth. Was looking for Uber app today. The first result was Flixbus. To be fair it is stated as "sponsored" in tiny letters.
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“
I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this:
1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an ad for a competitor at higher priority than the actual result.
2. Fraud. If I search for a product that Amazon sells and Amazon shows me an ad for a different product first and hides the product I searched for below the fold, they are effectively telling me that they don’t have the product I searched for and possibly that it doesn’t exist. It seems to me that this is deceiving me for commercial gain.
3. Fraud again. If I search for a specific book and Amazon shows me an ad for that book, I think they’re trying to trick me into clicking that ad so they get extra revenue even if I don’t intend to click an ad. (And they’ve defrauded the ad buyer too. Those clicks are bogus. Seth Godin should not be charged for a click when the clicker was searching for the book by a good approximation of its name!)
Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions :)
It reminds me of an analogy I read a while ago in an article critiquing keyword based online advertising (can't find the article unfortunately). A restaurant wants to drum up new business, so the owner tasks three employees with handing out flyers with coupons attached. The coupons are marked to identify which employee passed them out, and each week the owner gives a bonus to the employee whose coupons get redeemed the most. Week after week, the same employee keeps getting the bonus. The other two get more and more suspicious. Is he some kind of marketing genius that's able to get tons of people to use his coupons? Finally, they ask him how he does it. He says, "I stand in the waiting area of the restaurant".
This guy's publisher is paying Amazon $1/click to show the book to people who are already going to buy the book. It's basically the same thing.
You raise a good point. This phenomenon is well-documented for at least two decades now on Google search. It is common for brands to buy keywords for their own product. Why? If not, competitors will by the same keywords to direct customers away. As I understand, this has existed for more than 20 years and Google has never been sued for it (that I know). Maybe this is just part of a highly competitive online search market. To be clear: I am not saying that I like or agree with this market outcome as a consumer, but I am merely saying it has existed for a long time and gov't regulators don't seem to really care.
I don't know how it is for large businesses, but if you're a small business, and you put your own business name as a search keyword for your ad buys, fully half or more of your ad spend will be your existing customers looking for your website, phone number or address. If you stop spending on it, they will still find you, but a competitor will probably show up above you. I am not sure this matters.
Depends on what ads are showing and what they are bidding (vs. what you can afford to bid for the marginal traffic) but yes can be very much worth it to pay google's troll toll.
Google has been sued for displaying ads on trademarked keywords though.
This is what I wonder… the author says that:
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“
But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.
It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.
I'm equally confused here. Who searches "Seth Godin The Knot" and if the first result isn't that exact book, goes and buys a book about knots or weddings or something? The book should be there in plain view at the top of organic best matches. Did they really test this "yield" claim?
Sophisticated advertisers measure “incrementality”, which is exactly what you’re talking about. Alas, most advertisers are not sophisticated.
It’s worse than that. If that employee isn’t standing in the waiting room, handing out coupons some other restaurant’s employee will be standing in the waiting room, handing out coupon for the restaurant next-door.
Oh, and you have to pay the building owner for the coupons which also discount your food.
The term for this that I heard is:
> Advertising as inference not influence.
People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".
You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.
This reminds me of my dad's story about decades ago as a kid paperboy they had a contest get people to sign up and who ever had the most after a few months would win a bike. He smoked everyone. They were desperate to know how he got so many people to sign up but he refused to tell them.
His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.
> back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted.
I miss that world.
This case is even worse than the restaurant parable, because in that one the customer is already pretty much guaranteed and the coupon will give them enhance satisfaction that makes them more likely to come back. In Godin’s case, the customer doesn’t get that $1 and may not even buy the book, they may e.g. just be looking for the page to read reviews or link it to someone else.
Burnt myself on this in Google Maps just this week. I had an appointment in my calendar with the location set to "Dr Firstname Lastname, 123 Main St, 12345". I clicked through it into Google Maps and since it had the full address specified I just trusted it. Well, it turned out that the first result was actually an ad for a competing doctor 20 minutes in the wrong direction.
To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...
Same! I searched a local pizza place to pick up a pizza I had ordered and took the first result. I searched for the exact name, I saw a picture of pizza, and I hit directions. Halfway there it didn't feel right and I checked. It was Dominoes. I was furious and my pizza sat for an extra 7 minutes.
I needed directions to a family member's house after she moved. Clicked on her address from the text message, and Google tried to send me to a real estate agent's office instead.
This is egregious. I would be livid if I drove 20 minutes to an ad buyer's location instead of the actual address, after putting in the actual address to google maps. This is completely the opposite of what a map should be doing for you.
If you can, use Apple maps for now, although Apple has proudly proclaimed that they will be serving ads in maps soon. I also refuse to use the maps.app.goo.gl short links that google maps always wants to send. They will trap you in the compromised google search ecosystem. Insist on using raw addresses. I will paste in the raw address every time someone in a group chat sends a goo.gl link.
Ouch. But at least there is OSMand.
"to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
I would show up at the competing doctor and make things as awkward as possible. They chose to do that ad.
Do they even have any idea that their ads are showing up for the specific competing doctor? Isn't Google the one deciding where the ads are most valuable?
If they don’t know, showing up and telling them will let them know.
If you excuse the effects that people’s actions have because they didn’t realize they were causing them, you guarantee that those effects will never stop.
These are creative, but you haven’t thought them through. Do you really want brands to own trademarks on their keywords? So that when, to pick a random example, you search the internet for “1-800 Contacts,” nobody else is allowed to show an ad that says “Hey Amluto! We sell the same thing cheaper!”[1]
2 is just being bad at business. Which is why I’m skeptical it happens.
3, I hate to break it to you, basically happens in every major store you walk into in America. Google “slotting fees.” If you think customers want an alternative, apply to YC!
[1] The FTC (on your behalf) sued 1-800 contacts for trying this. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/08/...
IIRC, at one time, in Aotearoa/New Zealand at least, Coca Cola Amatil (or whoever it is) had trademarked 'Always'. It may have been some other word, but it was definitely a common word. And it wasn't the particular branding, just the word
seems they've ruled the practice is ok:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/warby-parker-fends-...
> Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions
Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/amazon-reinstates-b...
How long till binding arbitration is meditated by AI?
in california you can opt out of binding arbitration within 30 days of signing the contract.
that's only to complain about their service to you, not cases like fraud or copyright infringement, which was the subject here
Can we make a class action lawsuit target multiple storefronts? Apple and Google desperately need to be gently reminded of this less. With a power drill attached dildo. Their searches are trash, first hit is always an ad.
I don't want any of your arguments to be supported in law.
The day someone can sue me because they searched for something on my web site and what they expected didn't come up, my web site is effectively legally prevented from having a search box.
The action needed here is anti-trust style / monopoly action. If there were viable competitors it wouldn't matter what Amazon's search box does. The fact the US government is in denial about the whole principle of the need for robust anti-trust / competition enforcement that is the core issue here.
I understand why you are opposed to the arguments and I like the idea of anti-trust action, but ...
The anti-trust cases I am familiar with spanned decades. Perhaps it's not a representative sample, yet it also makes sense. Anti-trust basically says they're doing something that is normally legal, but they're abusing their power over the market in a way that makes those actions illegal. You're moving from prosecuting actions to intent. That is a whole lot more difficult to prove.
I'm also uncertain how I feel about prosecuting a company just because it is a monopoly. I absolutely hate monopolies, and large monopolies almost certainly got to where they were by illegitimate means. On the other hand, it is difficult to untangle legitimate consumer choice from a monopoly manipulating the market to remove that choice.
The reason this is a thing is that other people can bid on your product (Amazon has an entire sponsored product category for this reason). So the reason for Seth Godin to bid on ads for "Seth Godin The Knot" is to try to crowd out other people bidding on the same term (eg another book on the same topic). Can be smart but you don't have to play this game if you don't want to, and the ACOS will tell you if it's worth playing. Even if you don't bid on those ads your own product will be the first result. It's just whether you want to bid up the price for competitors -- if you don't bid on your own product someone else can come in and buy the ad spots cheaply.
Hopefully Seth's publisher knows this?
1. If you get banned from Amazon largely this is very bad for business. They can find a reasonable excuse I’m sure!
2. Fraud is a stretch, these things are labelled even if it’s deliberately designed to be difficult to understand. The discovery on this would be fascinating though because I can guarantee you there’s records somewhere of a ticket to make things more deceptive…
3. I don’t think the fraud thing will get you the results you want (I guess this is a slightly ironic statement given what we’re talking about). According to Claude it’s more likely deception under “FTC Act §5” but you can’t directly do this anymore and apparently “Amazon reinstated binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver in its Conditions of Use, effective 14 August 2026.” So even taking them to court got much much more difficult.
I think unfortunately until a different administration (maybe one less motivated by billionaire donors) comes in, we are stuck with this type of practice.
This is terrible behavior and it should be condemned, but I see no reason it should be illegal. There’s no deception in any of this. It’s like going to a store and asking an employee where the Widgets are, and they show you the Doodads instead because they’re more profitable. This is scummy but by no means illegal. The Doodads are labeled as Doodads. The advertisers know where their ads can be shown and under what conditions they’ll be charged for a click. It’s all dickish but it’s not fraud.
Is this argument applicable to nuisance laws?
What nuisance laws are you referring to and how would this argument potentially apply?
unless the othet sellers are selling counterfeit books, you have zero grounds for any of those.
worked in advertisement, and there's legal precedent to allow bidding on competitor brands (for every advertising network joy).
This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.
It was only 600 words. I understand there is a push against AI bloated slop here, but I don't think we should discourage good prose.
I just wanted to share that I find Seth's daily blog consistently excellent.
Yes. I paused reading at some point just to marvel at the clarity of writing. It seems absurd to complain about length, it isn't long. Maybe we have different ideas what good writing is, but I'd say this is in the top percent.
AI can mirror this style of writing, but it can't mirror the clarity of thought behind it.
Now show Seth’s audience (which has been accumulated for a long time) your explanation and theirs. I’d wager most people would be scratching their heads and rereading yours, while they’d breeze through Seth’s. In other words, your take may be shorter, but it’s not clearer or necessarily faster to read when aiming for comprehension. Seth doesn’t write for people who visit HN everyday.
There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. The people who made their names beginning twenty years ago by marketing these expressions are losers who have simply been proven wrong. It is monotonous middle brow repetition See eg the left wing expose of the above mentioned brain death in Maher Aquanno https://archive.ph/YJaZr better in their academic papers like Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/04866134261415639
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-antitrust-training-wa...
> There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all.
How so? Amazon search is almost probably worse than 10 years ago.
When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
Since most things I buy from amazon are commodity type items I need quickly and cheaply, my method has been "Prime Only" + "Sort Lowest First". Add on a score minimum filter if the first results are junk.
If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.
The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).
Why do you assume they are all the exact same and not that some are using even cheaper ingredients/components?
There’s really no knowing what contaminating or failed spec made that batch super cheap.
It’s a race to the bottom, corners will be cut.
You can also just use an adblocker. uBlock Origin automatically blocks sponsored items out so you don't have to waste brainpower to avoid them.
OH MY GOD this completely fixes the problem. All the ad noise is gone.
This needs to be pinned as the top comment. Thank you!
of course, the best seller is usually whoever has spent the most on advertising
Mostly agree with this. Because what the article is saying is that it at least skews the best sellers towards those who spend more on ads.
And you can buy a position on the best seller list for your product.
Indeed, but it's more expensive so that weeds out some of the riffraff.
Results do seem better.. What in this instance, does "Best Sellers" mean?
One would hope it means it sorts by sales volume.
Best for you, or best for Amazon is the question.
"Featured", ha ha. Should rename to "Paid For by Ads".
It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality.
As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenient, fast delivery, easy returns and all that. But if you forego that convenience, there is usually a cheaper option: local shops, Chinese platforms, direct sales, etc...
It's confusing to me that amazon is in the ads business at all though. They're a retail service, not an ad business and it seems that all the ad business does is burn goodwill. They do have goodwill to burn, but it cheapens the entire experience.
How is it confusing? Most brick and mortar stores show ads for specific products. Online platforms other than Amazon do it too.
The only thing is that Amazon is more diversified than other retailers, in particular, they have AWS, essentially selling the platform that runs their website to third parties. It makes sense for them to offer sell their ad service to third parties too.
No one does it like Amazon, it requires users to walk through the sponsored ads before they can see organic search results, almost no other platform does this online. Walmart has a single strip of sponsored results at top, immediately leading to organic results, others like Target, HomeDepot do not mix in sponsored results with search results.
B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.
> B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.
Ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, even your physical Walmart store is also selling a lot of shelf space to manufacturers/advertisers (similar to how Amazon sell the first slot, or at this point first 'page'), especially those checkout lines (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-grocers-wring-extra-cash-ou...). That's why your on-boots retail staff can't change those planograms (which defines how to layout shelf space in a grocery store) willy-nilly, they're designed by the highest bidder. That's why those soda or chips seems placed in too convenient slots that are also 'coincidental' to those currently advertised in other ways, because it's, plain and simply, paid to be there.
How does the saying go, again? "You may not be in the ad business, but the ad business is in you"? Something like that? That sounds wrong, but sometimes it seems like the double entendre may as well be the reality.
Per the article, in exchange for that goodwill they get a billion dollars per week. Do we need more explanation?
To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.
I don't expect to get any sort of explanation from Amazon of course. I do think they are probably doing something that is hurting them financially. Acquired goodwill is extremely hard to measure and shows up in things like long-term customer retention and engagement, so you're not going to see it on an A/B test -- on a A/B test users come in with the same level of goodwill on both sides of the fork and thus their immediate behavior is not going to be dictated by this.
In many ways this is symptomatic of larger trends in society and managerial culture of looking for ways to measure things rather than confronting the messy subjective non-measurable reality.
The only time we'll get a true counterfactual is when a competitor arises who can meet Amazon's very high bar for logistic excellence but can offer a more appealing interaction, and then Amazon retail will die off without anyone understanding how or why it happened.
I still use Amazon despite them being burned because they seem slightly more reliable than other places, but only slightly and my goodwill to them is completely burned. Yesterday they delivered a package to a parcel locker 150 miles away, which is a double screw up because it was supposed to be to the door. They've also made it really difficult to see where a package will be shipped from (and so whether or not you'll pay import taxes).
But I'm close. My purchases through them are down probably somewhere around 80%. My girlfriend never really used Amazon and doesn't see the appeal at all - telling someone "it used to be good" makes you wonder what you're doing.
Even AWS has burned me and clients enough times that we pretty much don't use them anymore - an idea that was unthinkable a decade ago.
The other thing is that the more they burn this goodwill the more they'll be tempted to increase ad revenue, and the more the goodwill will disappear.
> It is convenient, fast delivery, easy returns and all that.
Not, however, reliable. Ordered espresso filters, got counterfeits; ordered new monitor, got used, with a scratch in the screen, followed by a runaround game while demanding a replacement.
> It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
It has everything to do with amazon.
Amazon has chosen to embed ads into the navigation used to shop on their site. It is a conflict with the customer's needs in just about every way possible.
I think the only time I saw something so blatant was years ago at the Cheesecake factory, where they had ads in their menu (not really food-related)
> It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
It doesn't have to be that way. Can you keep your search results pure and put ads next to them. If the ads are good, customers will be interested.
Yes, you will have fewer clicks (i.e. less ad revenue) than if you try to deceive your customers by not clearly marking ads. But you don't have to enshittify your page. Enshittification also lowers the value of your business, particularly in the long term.
> It is just how ads work
First, no. You have missed the point of the piece entirely.
Second, even if you were right, is that an argument for it working that way? If this were a blog post about how gangrene sucks, would you be making the same case?
I’m just going to keep doing this like once a month here forever: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
>If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place).
What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of its quality? How would I break through, if not ads?
There's also the fact that Amazon really doesn't know the best-reviewed item anyway, at least in any meaningful sense, since most reviews (including verified) are fake/inorganic.
Right. If the only metric was "best-reviewed" then more people would be faking reviews.
To be clear I'm not letting Amazon entirely off the hook here, but Seth's situation is somewhat unique in that "someone looking for a particular book" seems to me like a really different use case than "I want an air fryer".
And "Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive" falls a little flat when a main reason for shopping on Amazon is that their prices tend to be really good.
You pay Amazon $200 and give free product to Vine reviewers in exchange for a seed pool of "unbiased" reviews (see link below). If you're not worried about the risk of getting your seller account canceled, there are also other ways of manufacturing your initial sales and review volume.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
> How would I break through, if not ads?
You wouldn't, your product would languish in obscurity and unless the searcher knew the exact actual product name forever be on page 200 of the search results (As a Sci-Fi book author I found this out the hard way). Influencers and having followers can also help your product break through, but that's about it. Self promotion of your product is usually actively discouraged or banned by many forums.
Perhaps you could title your next book "Seth Godin The Knot".
> How would I break through, if not ads?
Make YouTube videos. Food porn is a thing, and some subset of that crowd will want to watch you fry stuff with your "pro" fryer.
But you're in the air fryer production business, not in the food video production biz (which is really saturated). So you likely don't have the skills to launch a food porn channel organically, so you have to pay a youtuber, which is not the worst, but the yield would be unpredictable (and more costly to test). Sounds overall better than Amazon ads, though.
This is up there with talk to your neighbors and put flyers on windshields.
It is a bandaid for a dysfunctional market with high transaction costs of trust(reputation) and triangulation(discovery).
Amazon only excells at low transfer cost - no negotiation and cheap delivery
So, your alternative to ads is… Ads? If you’re making a YouTube channel to promote your product, that’s still an ad. It’s just taking you longer (and probably more money) to get it out.
I'm surprised there isn't a market for an amazon like competitor that is a mix of Amazon and Consumer Reports.
They do the reviews themselves, watch for returns and quality issues, and can actually provide consumers with the best products.
Maybe it really is impossible to run a business that way, and that's why Consumer Reports is stuck a stickler about putting up walls around its reputation for independence.
The point of this article is that, if Amazon doesnt want you do, then you wont.
Amazon is a net-negative overall but I don't think this understanding is correct:
> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse.
This is only true in extremely simply scenarios. In reality, most of the time individual consumers may prefer something other than "the highest ranked item in this category." Maybe another company has a feature that increases cost but adds utility, maybe there's a brand you trust more that makes a slightly less popular version, etc.
The problems of parasitic advertising still exist. People still see ads for products they will like less than the top rated search, but it's wrong to imagine that Amazon actually knows what that person would like best. If matching people to products was that easy you'd have all kinds of 3rd party recommendation services making very specific recommendations to make money off affiliate links. Instead we have a million "top 10" sites that work about as well as picking the #1 seller in an amazon category: not that well.
You raise a very good counter to what feels like the main thrust of the guys article. It put to words something that felt "off" to me while reading it, that there was an assumption made that was never stated and was also incorrect - so thanks for putting that to words.
He seems to assume that there is 1 air fryer that everyone on Earth should be getting, and all others are strictly inferior. There are probably no products that exists where that logic is true. There is so much variation in cost vs quality, or entire feature-sets like you pointed out.
This bleeds over into incredibly "messy" areas too, like societal signaling. Someone might specifically want a more expensive version of something simply because it's more expensive. The author doesn't seem to account for any of this complexity, even the "simple" complexity of cost/quality/features.
The value that these types of ads can add is that Amazon can build up models that can "learn" and get better at matching every unique persons criteria and provide a way for vendors to get "matched" with that buyer. Obviously you can still critique this model, but to assume it's strictly bad feels like it lacks nuance/critical thinking.
I think the article’s argument depends on Amazon having a great search engine that can surface the Pareto frontier of air friers, not just a single universal best. Then contaminating that great engine with ads that strictly make it worse.
But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.
I don't think that nuance changes the big picture which is that Amazon has a conflict of interest between showing you the best product that you want, and showing you the product that the seller is most willing to pay to advertise. Quibbling over nuance just gives air cover to this fundamentally extractive rent seeking behavior. We really need stronger anti-trust action in the tech era given the extremely low friction and winner-takes-all dynamics of modern tech economy.
"Nuance isn't relevant here because I've already assumed what they're doing is strictly bad" is what I'm haering.
Engaging with the nuance means engaging with the fact that rent-seeking can only exist where value (real or perceived) actually exists. Amazon is only able to sell these ads because sellers get value out of them through increasing sales using the infrastructure that Amazon built. The fact that they capitalize on that by creating a market for those ad-buyers to compete in (rent-seeking, as you'd call it) is not remotely surprising, they should be able to profit using the systems they built up. This is akin to paying more to rent a "better" booth to sell at at a trading card convention; or for ads costing more during the Superbowl halftime than at 2am on local news. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of that.
As far as a conflict of interest, Amazon is still incentivized to get a potential customer to make a purchase, and (more importantly) to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If Amazon develops a reputation of giving suggestions for junk products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon. It's "naturally" regulated in that way. Gibing some governing body the power to regulate what companies are/aren't allowed to suggest to their customers feels like it's only relevant if this was a true monopoly.
Re: monopolies- Amazon is not hiding alternative products to those in the ads; customers are people with the autonomy to find the product that best suites their needs, and they still have full capability of doing that. There are also plenty of other ways to purchase products, I'd guess that 95%+ of products available on Amazon can be sold/purchased elsewhere, it's just that Amazon is the most convenient way (for both buyers and sellers).
You're right that I jumped to a conclusion, and it's possible I'm wrong.
One thing that is structurally certain though: Amazon and other major corporations have almost unlimited time and direct incentives to find reasons to justify this point of view, while the people whose interests are being potentially being harmed (all Amazon customers) don't have much concentrated resources or focused, actionable incentives at the individual actor level to put together the counter case. I think it's incredibly important keep this asymmetry in mind before dismissing a take like Godin's in favor of Amazon friendly talking points.
I appreciate your response and perspective, and I apologize that my reply had been more snarky than it needed to be.
I'm not here just to defend Amazon, it has it's issues, but it has also provided a lot of value to it's customers, all things considered (building out the largest most efficient supply/distribution chain ever, increasing convenience, reducing cost, and giving access to wide range of product choices). I just think it's important to take full stock of what the benefits are as well as to understand if harms are actually harms or just assumed harms. Basically, just to understand what the tradeoffs are, and that there's likely something positive to be found. I try to apply this thinking to more than just Amazon- like I said, I'm not here just to defend it.
Thanks again for the levelheaded response, I'll leave this feeling like I understand the point you were making better.
Civil discourse is not dead on the internet! Thank you as well.
I think the idea is true if you reverse it: there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives.
This also lines up a lot better with other complaints with amazon: their inability to get rid of counterfeit sellers, the degree to which their reviews (and listings) are gamed, etc. Arguably the reason people buy garbage on Amazon has more to do with their lack of interest in policing misbehavior than ads (though perhaps the ads are the financial incentive to keep being lazy).
You can see this with the knockoff[1] plugin that flags "no-name" brands on amazon. Sometimes this takes out the listings you want and you need to consider it, but I think it's a pretty effective counter to the kinds of scammy ads this poster is frustrated with.
[1] https://knockoff.co/
> there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives
OK, but the customer is the only person who gets to decide what that means. "Reversing the idea" is just making the same (imo faulty) assumption that the author is, which is that there is some known "good value" product that everyone should be buying. What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else.
If anything, allowing for ads like Amazon does is probably more likely to match a customer to the product that's "good value" for them. If someone consistently buys products after sorting price low>high, then you know something about their purchasing habits - giving them a recommendation to buy a $450 air fryer because it's "good value" (decided by who?) isn't helpful when they really just want something barebones for $100.
I don't think that's true. I think deficient or faulty products exist and amazon often sells them. It is not at all assuming that everyone should buy one product - simply that there are psudo-scam products that would be risky for anyone to buy.
Like, are you suggesting that when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs? That doesn't seem very likely to me.
> I think deficient or faulty products exist and amazon often sells them.
So nothing I said disagrees with this. I agree that "pseudo-scam" products and counterfeits exist on Amazon, but if something is risky/dangerous for someone to buy, Amazon is at least partially liable for this - I got a product recall from Amazon for a water kettle (that Amazon doesn't make) that had some defect that could lead to scalding.
While it's a problem, Amazon is incentivized to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If they develop a reputation of giving suggestions for junk/scam/counterfeit products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon - at both the individual, and word of mouth levels. Your concern is "naturally" regulated in that way. Amazon wants to keep it's customers happy so it can keep selling them things, and selling them crap is a bad way to keep them happy.
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> when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs
What did I say that would imply this? No, I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that some people want to pay less ($100 vs $450) for a cheaper product (barebones version) and that's what represents good value to them - not something at the same price that's fake, I really don't know where you think I implied that lol.
Gotcha - then I think you are misreading my 2nd post - directing consumers away from psudo-scam products is "reversing" the understanding. Not assuming everyone wants one perfect product, but realizing that almost everyone wants to avoid known bad products. A bare bones $100 air fryer is good value.
> I really don't know where you think I implied that
When you said "What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else." you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value. I articulated that idea to an absurd degree in suggesting that you were saying some people would be happy to be scammed - which might be true if good value is impossible to understand objectively.
It's possible we're not on the same page on what you meant, but after your clarifying, it still requires defining what a "bad product" is, and that's not as easy as it feels like you're suggesting. A cheap product can be both good value and a bad product, depending on the type of product/intended use/customer expectations/etc. But it's up to the customer to decide that.
The main point I'm trying to make there is that customers are unpredictable (and irrational) and they have autonomy, and they need to bear at least some responsibility in making sure what they are buying meets their needs/wants, regardless of what Amazon was paid to suggest to them. This is true everywhere, like at a grocery store - it would be a silly article if it complained about more expensive or store-brand products being placed at eye-level when a "better deal" might be 3 shelves down. That's essentially what Amazon is doing and what the complaint is.
> you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value
This is something I stand by (see above), but you would have to take it to an absurd extreme to conclude that it means I think people are happy being scammed.
Being scammed on Amazon a separate problem, with other avenues of recourse (filing complaints directly to Amazon/requesting refunds, legal system for counterfeits or misleading advertising, etc.), and Amazon is financially incentivized to avoid it to keep customers happy/returning.
It's not that unknowable. When a customer makes a deliberate tradeoff that's fine. But some products are strictly worse than others. You can build a pareto front out of features and price and see which products are near it and which are way behind.
There is probably an air fryer that would be a good choice for the majority of people, and probably also the best choice for a large minority. This is probably true for a large number of popular products.
I think this comment is mistaken. The blog post is simplistic and doesn't cover the case you're describing of multiple good products for different consumers, but it's ultimately still right. Ads are not a good solution for this use case either because they don't exist to actually match consumers to good products, they exist to selfishly drive sales to their brand owners. That goal is parasitic to the service of product recommendation. Similarly with Amazon itself, their goal is to maximize some combination of sales revenue and ad revenue.
The solution to this is just what you described, a 3rd-party recommendation service. I don't think there's any reason Amazon should be able to make better recommendations than I can with a minute or two of research. Advertising giants only have a marketing profile on people, I think it's fairly limited in terms of how helpful it can be.
The problem with the "top 10" sites you mention is ironically that they are almost all actually advertisement sites, not genuine product recommendation sites. This means they get paid to place products and are essentially corrupt. I would guess the ecosystem is so universally horrible is because SEO costs money and requires them to aggressively monetize to exist. I've read that the Wirecutter is one of the only genuine sites and I find that it usually works fairly well at the price bracket they choose and for certain kinds of home goods.
I agree with the conclusions of the article, and I am no fan of Amazon or search ads on any product.
However, I would like to play devil's advocate for a moment to brainstorm another issue.
Let's say I build a product that is better than others in the market. We all agree that competition is good becuase it leads to better products and lower prices.
However, the algorithm favors entrenched players. A product that has been bought many times and has positive reviews will be the first in the search results and people usually buy that. Which means I have no way to compete other than paying my way at the top of the list.
I'm not stating this as the ultimate solution or even a good one. But I think it's worth to ask the question.
I don't love (but use...) Amazon but I think if done properly, ads can be relevant even when searching for a specific thing.
Let's use a Google Example: I search for Toyota RAV4 and get an ad for Mazda cx-50. Obviously Toyota hates that but as a consumer it has a chance of making me aware of something I didn't know but would want to know, especially as a part of a purchase decision. That's why Mazda pays for that ad slot, and also why Toyota makes it expensive for them :)
Obviously google in this scenario comes out ahead and it is annoying for some users but can be highly valuable if done well.
It's not how I search or shop but plenty of people do.
No. If I search "Toyota RAV4" what I mean is Toyota RAV4. If I meant Mazda CX-50 I would have typed "Mazda CX-50." If I wanted information about various mid-size SUVs, rather than one in particular, I'd have searched "midsize SUVs."
The number of times I have searched something, got back something I did not ask for, and found that helpful, rounds down to zero. It's actively destructive to the platforms that allow this kind of hijacking of search terms.
Agreed. Also a search along the lines “cars like Toyota RAV4" when I intend to broaden the search to other equivalents, because I don’t know the terminology.
Are you saying that because it’s across company boundaries? Or would you be similarly upset if one result was for a Toyota Highlander? Or for a Toyota RAV4 XSE but not the LE trim
I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion
Yes! It's very frustrating when I think I'm browsing several variations of a single product, only to realize that some of the results are a totally different product, the brand doesn't affect it either way. I'm fine seeing results for multiple trims if I didn't specify one.
>I'm fine seeing results for multiple trims if I didn't specify one.
And when you DO specify one, but get results for something else entirely?
The day searches started giving us ads instead of what we asked for (as opposed to in addition to what we asked for) was the day they stopped being useful. Which for Google was many years ago. This is not "cross shopping suggestions", it's an abuse of a monopoly for profit.
Literally everyone I know feels this way, even if they don't care about it as passionately. No one "appreciates" being openly manipulated to their financial detriment.
That’s pay to spam. Letting advertisers determine relevance of their product to a keyword is not exactly a user enhancing experience. When searching for rav4, i give you the ad for taylor swift concert, obviously understanding you can pay for it. This is spamming. “Relevant” ads should be determined by content producers
Would you, while shopping for a car, decide to buy very expensive concert tickets? Neither would I. So this campaign would have very low CTR and would perform poorly.
It would only perform well if you identified some actual source of latent demand. For example, maybe many people searching for Taylor Swift concert tickets would actually be happy with movie tickets to see a simulcast. At which point, you are providing real information to some searchers.
We can debate and disagree about whether this is something you want in your search results, but it’s not spam. Spam exists because it doesn’t have to compete in an auction.
This is the most baffling comment I think I’ve ever read
Did you know that the sum of the natural numbers is -1/12?
You search for Toyota RAV4, and you get an ad for whoever paid Google the most money to fingerprint your profile and bias your purchase decision. Since when did we start trusting everything we see on the Internet?
In any retail webstore, or even on Spotify, YouTube, etc. all the searches are infuriating today.
If I search for specific terms then I get a menu of slop to choose from. Search isn't built to serve the searcher at all. Search is meant to surface things that are promoted, hyped, advertised, or paid for in some way.
So you search Amazon for stuff and a lot of crap added on to it. Any retail site's filters are useless for filtering out what you don't want to see or casting a net for desirable features. I swear--search for "bananas" at a grocery store and you'll get results for ice cream and baby food and Minions merchandise and organic pears?
This behavior has already crept into LLM responses. I often request that they compile a list of the top-5 or top-10 according to some criteria. And it never fails that they cannot resist giving me outliers and things that don't fit by any means. Now I don't know what influences an LLM to give stupid non-matching results, but I know they do. Is RLHF already baking-in advertising and sponsorship? I wouldn't rule it out.
Case in point: the other day I was thinking of Amy Schumer but couldn't remember her name. So I struck up a convo with Copilot, and described Schumer by profession, personality, and physical attributes. Copilot first suggested a slender Black woman. Then Diablo Cody. And eventually compiled me a list of 5-7 people who were nothing like Amy Schumer. Never once even thought to mention her. Once I surfaced her name by other means, I went back and scolded Copilot, just so I could feel smug and better about myself. But it's genuinely surreal.
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now.
Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy.
Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video ..
There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it..
We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.
Searched for jeans a few days ago. I got about 3.3% each, scattered through several dozen pages, of two American brands; 1.65% each another couple of brands; a smattering of one or two results for another couple of brands; the remaining approximately 90% were the almost exact same jeans (maybe the same), under several names... pages and pages of them. It is almost impossible to shop for clothes on Amazon now. It used to be just selecting for 1 or 2 day delivery only would trim down the chaff, although now those products are also serviced through the warehouses (and there are less options for one day or same day delivery than years ago, Prime or not).
Some of the products aren't that bad (most are at least better than these sorts of results would spit out when it first started, years ago), but the prices are also at the same not-too-cheap, not pricey moderate price-point as the (of course I know many of those brands are not American but I know how they fit) known brands. Whoever is coding language parsing at Amazon.com must be really challenged by the brands; I get that; but there has to be a way to make it less stressful to shop. Maybe Bezos is just secretly trying to get us all to buy clothes where we don't buy food and books. Ha.
But yes, the language and sorting models being used by Amazon suck.
It’s not just clothes. Unless the item is a very specific name brand thing, I find Amazon nearly useless for discovery. It’s effectively Ali Express with much higher markup and much faster shipping. I suppose there’s a market for that.
Unfortunately for them, I’d rather buy cheep Chinese crap from a local retailer where there is still a human buyer in the loop choosing something that’s not the lowest bottom of the barrel junk.
When I worked there a long time ago I spoke to the search team about moving more towards a New Egg style filtering model. When I’m looking for something there’s often very specific features I want. Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want. I’ve bought more than a few wrong things due to this. Returns must not factor into whatever fees they’re making off everything else.
I guess for things like clothes or generic homegoods, I've seen this deluge of random China goods. But shopping for other things, like electronics, it does a really good job of surfacing what I'm actually looking for, whether that be name brand or generic.
If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.
Surprisingly, their "Alexa for Shopping" feature has been quite good for finding products that contain a specific set of desired features.
I was looking for a device that plugs into my car's 12V cigarette lighter outlet, connects with my phone's Bluetooth, outputs the audio to 3.5mm aux (my car has aux input but no Bluetooth), has no battery, automatically turns on with my car, has next and previous track buttons, and outputs USB-C with at least 30W.
Amazon's search filters were useless for this, but their LLM was able to read through reviews and suggest products that come very close. Unfortunately, no exact product exists that fulfills all the requirements.
Their LLM tells me that it can't perform searches and can't read reviews, and then does both things anyway. It consistently takes me at least 4 interactions before it begins to produce useful results.
It may be better than the uselessness of the Amazon search box, but that's a very low bar.
I went through that same search a couple times. I felt that this was such an obvious thing that I was amazed that it didn't exist on Amazon, Aliexpress, or anything else.
> Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want.
Not exactly, they'll show you the items they want you to buy/are paid to promote. They don't actually think you want the crap their search surfaces, at most they think they can con you into buying that stuff anyway as long as they make it difficult or impossible for you to find what you're actually looking for.
Yeah, the pity is that Amazon almost went this direction. They have a set of filters! They just don’t work. Not only do they clearly not want you to use them (the filters prematurely reset if you do virtually anything), but their coverage is weird and again, they don’t even work. You’d think Amazon themselves would have basic, valid data but they just don’t care.
As an example of how this stacks up, in the app, I filter air fryers to be red. Easy, right? One option, two sponsored, three more options, an autoplay video ad for a non-red one, then another sponsored link, “customers frequently viewed carousel with more sponsored links, one of which is not red, (so this is a full phone screen and a half with zero real results), one more result, two sponsored links, three more results, and then a non-red deep fryer, which is not even an air fryer to begin with. How does a silver deep fryer end up in these results at all?
The shittiness continues. A sponsored link to a toaster oven (not an air fryer either), another sponsored link, a real result, a used air fryer, silicone liners (not air fryers), a carousel of “trending now” including four of five items that are not air fryers either (and a low-rated red air fryer I haven’t seen yet… which makes me think they are outright lying about it being a ‘trending’ item), another carousel with “brands related to your search”, ALSO sponsored, two more results, another near full screen autopay video ad, three sponsored links for air fryer accessories, two real results for more accessories, then two more real red air fryer results, though one is only available used.
I’m exhausted just typing that out. It’s soul-crushing. A good two-thirds of total screen real estate in any given session is just pure ads. And I typed “red air fryer”, so don’t show me a red air fryer silicone liner! That’s not what I asked for. If you must, label it in a carousel that says “matching accessories, that’s both user friendly and appropriate!
Most of the stuff Amazon search spits out by default now is identical to what you find on temu, just at 5 times the price.
You can make it slightly more useful by changing the sort order to average rating or best selling, but for many "normie" things the bestselling will just be the crap amazon shows people by default.
The dark pattern I've noticed a few times is the exact match I type into Amazon search doesn't even return the item I entered but 2 or 3 entire pages of alternatives.
I know the item is there because Google returns it, either as a search response or in their "shopping" widget. I can click through Google to Amazon and see the item, sometimes even from the certified seller. But if I enter the exact search term in Amazon's search bar it doesn't show up in their own results.
Search is just there to show amazon what you want so that they can show you what they want you to buy instead. Companies want everything to be push instead of pull. They don't want you to be able to choose what you buy, they want to push whatever they want (or are paid to push) at you to buy, and you're just expected to take what little you're offered, thank them for it, and be grateful.
> Companies want everything to be push instead of pull.
This reminds me of Instagram's search page, which is full of animated videos jumping at you to dissuade you from completing the search you wanted and just click on what they want you to see.
Social media sites are full of this. They want to decide what you see or don't see instead of just showing you what your friends post in chronological order. Streaming services are another good example. They don't want to give you an A-Z listing of what's on offer. They want to show you a small selection of titles, repeated over and over across a bunch of vague/meaningless categories.
The last big redesign netflix made was pretty much universally hated, but they were mostly upfront about the fact that it was intended to take choice away from users and highlight the shows they wanted to promote. For a company that got where they are because people wanted "on demand" over cable TV it seems strange to hear them now saying "Choosing for yourself is so hard! Just let us tell you what to watch!" but that's the attitude every company seems to be taking.
Or every social media (especially Instagram)'s home page which shows the most engagement-baiting videos of this week and nothing from the people you follow
Yes, this is a horrible practice. Not just Amazon… most major e-commerce platforms set up fake pages for products they don’t offer to try to get you to the products they actually do.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
Google used to explicitly ban this and the very similar practise of keyword stuffing - they even delisted some high profile company sites (BMW is one that I remember) over those practices. They stopped caring about that sort of thing quite some time ago, and right now as they are in danger of losing what little most they have as people move to AI solutions where they are not the leader that they have historically been in the more traditional search space, I doubt it'll be any sort of priority for them in the foreseeable future.
Google doesn't care about you. If you have to close one website that is infested with Google's ads/tracking because it doesn't actually have the product what you want and you're forced to search for another website that's also infested with Google's ads/tracking that's much better for Google's bottom line. That's what Google cares about.
Until you stop using google search, which I and many other people I know have done.
Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.
Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a competitor's products.
It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.
Google beat out the competition by being better in a market with near zero switching costs. It can coast a long time without being the best option, but once the fall starts it’s always harder to gain back reputation.
Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.
“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.
> Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
Many products get worse so they are cheaper to manufacture, more shelf stable, etc and can therefore be profitably sold to more people. Sometimes the opposite happens, but in general when a company optimizes for people with less disposable income than you the product gets worse from your perspective.
I'm sure they know that. Cycling enshittification on and off seems to make more money overall than not enshittifying, even though it can make less during the downcycle.
Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins.
There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.
Why worry about how a stock will look in a decade when you can buy and sell in microseconds based on AI, tweets, and vibes. Screwing over users makes people money today. Long before the consequences kick in investors can jump ship to the next corporation victimizing their userbase. Google's probably too big to fail at this point though. If they push away users and the AI bubble bursts taxpayers will be footing the bill.
Becoming wealthy and maintaining wealth are very different mindsets.
Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.
As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.
What spiral? You just start another brand, producing extremely similar but unenshittified products. When that one takes over the market, you enshittify that one too. It doesn't matter that one brand died, because you keep making more. That's the cycle.
It’s hard for a large company to survive on something with a vastly smaller market share. You can make a living buying a portfolio from other people making it slightly worse over time and repeat, but the pipeline gets expensive and the market is fickle.
Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.
Is that the "Amazon Tax"? I thought the Amazon tax was their goofiness practice of taking a very large % of all sales in their site, and banning companies from selling their same goods for less on any competitor site.
Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.
Amazon's AI search doesn't do that, however. For that reason, 90% of my searches are now prompts to the AI, instead of regular searches. But it occassionally freezes the app.
Interesting. I always click through to the regular search instead of waiting for the AI results to load, under the assumption that they'll be even worse (somehow) than normal search. Maybe I should give it a try.
It was rebranded as "Alexa for Shopping"; that is what I am referring to.
This "dark forest" feeling is what has recently driven me back to brick-and-mortar stores. Of course they can and do manipulate me via ads, store layout etc. but at least the store looks the same for me as for the person before or after me. They can't algorithmically optimize the store around my behavior in particular.
Recently I was looking for a fun summer book and spent around 30 minutes (?) browsing amazon and asking google AI with no luck.
Came by a bookstore yesterday, went in, asked the nice lady, she recommend 3, one was a pretty good match, bought it on the spot.
It’s so easy to get lost online when you’re looking for something these days…
ah but what they can manipulate around you is the price, which is a behavior some places are trying to get ahead of
https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260723a.shtml
Has that actually happened in retail stores? All I can find on the topic is about online purchases (or ordering/paying online and picking it up at the store).
To do this in brick-and-mortar, you'd have to use remotely programmable price tags and detect who is looking at what, which seems doable, but then you still run into all kinds of tough questions with no good answers. If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register? And did a legal sale even occur if I wasn't aware what I would be paying? I don't think it's going to work.
"Please scan this item with our app to see the price"
As of now, my local supermarkets still have price tags on the shelves. And if there's a higher price at the register when the item is scanned, they will honor the shelf price if you call it to their attention. The biggest supermarket now has e-ink shelf tags so I assume those are synced with their item database so that doesn't happen anymore.
it's the other way around, the shelf prices can be stable and they decide which discounts you can get based on your shopping profile which they built using surveillance
Well,,, OK?
If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.
Though mostly, the discounts I use are already posted on the shelf, I just need to "clip" an e-coupon in the app to get it.
They do send me emails and even postal mails with coupons too, but those all go in the trash.
It's the opposite in my market and with my store.
I never get coupons for what I actually buy, I only get coupons for things I don't buy. Those things are sometimes related, but if I wanted the other brand, I'd already be buying the other brand.
Depending on the retailer, they may have little say in what goes on sale. I work for a retailer and 98% of our promotions are based on what our distributors and producers offer us, whether it directly says manufacturer coupon or whether we handle the discount after the fact as a scan-back/credit.
It's not really a "Well, OK?" situation.
The local supermarket chain near me has more or less done away with normal low prices on the shelves. If you want anything resembling a deal, you get to deal with their shit-tier quality app plus other friction inducting time wasting crap like "clipping" digital coupons. Plus opting in to all the associated tracking the app does in order to use it.
They effective raised prices 10-20% for the entire store and then the only way to get a deal is use the app. This is only currently slight hyperbole - every month it rolls out more and more in this direction.
This way they can tell regulators "we only give discounts in a discriminatory manner! We don't raise prices!" when the time comes.
With any luck a judge will see right through that unmitigated bullshit, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
This predates the 'Apps' by a good margin. Safeway used to do this a decade (or more?) ago. All the prices in shelves are artificially jacked up. Only if you use their 'card' you got real prices at checkout.
I refused to get their card and stopped shopping there.
Requiring the app also disadvantages the elderly, particularly with dementia, who can't operate a smartphone. In theory, the cashier is supposed to allow anyone to access the discount on request but, in practice, I've seen them get rather unfriendly, even to the elderly, when they have to go through the process of manually punching in the discount.
> If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.
Don't expect discounts on what you buy often. They know they have you hooked on those already and they'll drive up the price on those items (for you) the minute they can. They'll give discounts on brands you don't buy to entice you to switch (if those other brands pay them enough to do it). These surveillance pricing systems are not for your benefit. They aren't there to save you money. They only exist to take more of your money away from you.
is that still ok when you're paying more because you don't shop as much as the people who live in the wealthier part of town? or what if you get fewer discounts for being male?
Okay, and what happens at the register?
Yes, it's happening in brick-and-mortar. They've been conditioning people to accept the idea that prices will differ depending on who is doing the buying through the use of apps and loyalty cards (https://web.archive.org/web/20201111164410/http://www.nytime...)
They've known for a long time now that their profits will go through the roof if they can get away with it, but the fact that consumers find the practice offensive has held them back along with the cost of initial investments in things like digital price tags and facial recognition systems (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/s41272-019-002...) but all of it is coming. The big chains have already started. By the end of this year Walmart should have digital price tags in every store. Facial recognition is spreading too (often using loss prevention as an excuse). The grocery chain Kroger announced they'll be using facial recognition to offer different prices to different people. Their digital price tags scan faces, and your track appearance and behaviors, like how long you spend looking at various products.
It'll be simple for stores to do things like charge people more when their cameras see them wearing expensive clothes, or when the data collected from their app shows that they live in rich neighborhoods or when they can use the data they collect on you in combination with information from data brokers to learn what your income level is. I fully expect things to get even weirder like stores setting higher prices for people with the wrong opinions or political views. Algorithms will be caught "accidentally" discriminating on things like skin color and gender.
There's a little bit of pushing back against that kind of things in some places, but with the massive amounts of money on the table I expect that politicians will be bribed to allow it.
> If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register?
The store shelves have cameras in them. You won't see your price until the system detects you. They can even display your photo/avatar next to the price so you know that it's for you. Facial ID at the register tells them who you are when it's time to pay up. That's just for now though. Eventually it'll likely all happen in a cell phone app and you won't be able to as easily look over someone else's shoulder to see what price they're paying.
"Please scan this item with our app to see YOUR price" -ftfy
Somehow this doesn't scare me at all. Fast food restaurants have been doing this for like 8 years. Almost any order you could make normally, you could get a buck or two off of it if you order through their incredibly sluggish, bloated cross-platform-framework "app" and redeem a "deal." And they tell you this with giant ads.
The function is to get incremental sales (and hopefully establish a pattern of repeat business) by discounting selectively to people who might not buy at all otherwise.
If you're thinking "But they should give that discount to everybody!" that's not a thing. There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
My grocery store already sends me individualized paper coupons every month.
All of this is promotions. It's all just trying to get some incremental sales, and hoping that if you get an offer for free hot dog buns you'll also buy the hotdogs.
I've always figured the dream would be to be able to advertise a low price without ever having to deliver it.
Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".
But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you: - possess one of a range of sanctioned devices - have access to data services - are able to create and manage an account - are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry - can claim the "deal" in advance
Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.
I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.
Agree. I see it also as, and maybe it's just the kinda wealthy area that I live in (though I'm myself a lifelong cheapskate)... I assume that the upper 50%, by income, of the people who walk into these places value their time too much to spend it dicking around to get the promos, so it's a convenient way to maximize the revenue from the people who don't mind wasting money.
> There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
Strange how this totally worked until a few years ago. I never cut coupons or any other time wasting shenanigans, but was able to stop up on deals on the commonly used shelf-stable items I buy without even needing to signup to a loyalty program.
I understand price segmentation is a thing. But it's gotten pretty exhausting and only increasingly so.
Fast food you can simply opt out of. My health improved due to them shifting all the "deals" to the app, and doubling menu prices. Groceries are a different thing.
It doesn't scare you that $store can decide to double their lrice because they detected a brand new phone in your pocket?
This isn't even a little hypothetical- bluetooth had to anonomyze the MAC address to stop this, and it still fails sometimes.
If a store does this, they will eventually be caught and lose business
Lol
Maybe you haven't got sufficiently developed imagination...
https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/business/jetblue-x-post-sparks...
The idea of the price you pay could be far higher because your McSocial Credit Score is too low doesn't scare you?
I don't really care about fast food. That's strictly an optional luxury. If the experience sucks too badly, skip it. Grocery would be another matter.
I also think this hypothetical "scan to see your price" scenario is a lot worse. As things stand now, there's still a baseline price. If the shelf says $8.99 then you know that you may be able to get a better price through their loyalty program or with a coupon, but it will never be more than $8.99. In a fully dynamic pricing world where you have to scan scan to get a number at all, which is what a lot of businesses would really love to have, you'd lose that baseline. That item might ring up at $20 if the system decides I'm desperate or inattentive or just don't care. This is already possible online, of course. If it spreads to grocery stores, though, I'm going to start channelling Ned Ludd and it won't be pretty.
Related: I've seen several local restaurants offering extremely good food come up and die simply because they could never get attention.
People only look at recommendations now, they don't look with their eyes anymore.
So now restaurants have to focus on growth hacking rather than food quality.
This really isn't a new problem.
That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".
Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.
I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.
source: my parents were in the restaurant business
And its still location. Marketing will get get people to come try your food, but location gets them to come back every week.
Location makes them try it once. Quality makes them come back every week. Which is useless if they never tried it once. On the other hand if you set up in a place where each person only comes by once or twice in a lifetime, like an airport, you don't have to make them come back and you just have to make sure the food is tolerable.
To be fair, restaurants have always had very high failure rates (something like 75% close within the first year.)
Keeping a restaurant open is more about managing costs than having good food; many die because of not great inventory and supply chain handling, for example.
I've seen a lot of "Thai Food Near Me" as the name of restaurants.
What do you think would happen if they were called Current Location?
Slightly off topic, but that would be a great name for a curry restaurant
This is why the long-term survivors tend to be pretty mid chains & franchises. They've got the marketing down and the food is an afterthought.
>>Somehow nobody noticed.
I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.
As someone who notices a lot of things, I was talking recently with someone who notices almost nothing. When I spoke about my desire to seek out the truth, they simply replied, "I just want to live a happy life."
There’s a perception that those who seek knowledge and truth are somehow less happy. Ignorance, and the willingness to take the path of least resistance, can be seen as an advantage for those who would rather not look too closely. Fundamentally, perhaps the difference comes down to red pill versus blue pill, and the illusions we’re willing to accept.
A lot of knowledge and truth can be quite disappointing. I do think shielding oneself from truths and knowledge probably would make someone more happy. Think about it - do you think you would be more happy knowing the darkest thoughts and actions of those around you? Of those close to you? What if your spouse was having thoughts of leaving you? Would that make you more happy or less happy? I suppose you could say that if you were privy to their thoughts, you might discover that they love you and think about you more than you imagined, so that may be a net benefit, but I think we humans have a tendency to focus on the negative, and so an abundance of information leads us to focus on the negative things within the information, which makes us less happy.
There's nothing wrong with being a curious or attentive person who likes to notice things.
What I often see, especially in the social media era, is people who are selectively curious and like to notice negative things. So they'll share lots of articles with titles like "The Amazon Tax", which I agree was interesting and informative, but they're not at all interested in e.g. "How Amazon Is Bringing Fast Delivery to Rural America" (https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/how-amazon-is-bringin...). That's more of a problem, and I think it's what drives the idea that truth-seekers are less happy.
Enjoy your steak, Mr Reagan.
Except that this holds true for everything. For example, I only just today found out about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg&t=1157s, ie, Oracle's apparent complicity in genocide. Now that I know this, I now have to rethink things: what am I using that depends on Oracle that I need to migrate away from? This wasn't something I was concerned about just 24 hours ago. This is not to say it's not a valid concern: we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide, but this is demonstrably a case where I have given myself more work, more worry, from gaining knowledge.
Conscientiousness is incompatible with monotonicity of capability. That is:
1. We tend to believe "more power/knowledge/choices" is universally a good thing; that we are rational creatures in some sort of game theoretic landscape where we are free to optimize for our own outcomes, and extra options or information can only be to our optimization benefit.
2. We tend to believe that as moral agents, we have obligations to Good. More specifically, knowingly choosing against Good should in proportion produce Guilt.
The bind that results from (1)+(2) is distinctly Christian to me, obsessed as Christianity is with the notion of shame as a moral whip. It is an exercise in religionmaking how to structure one's psychological incentives so that solipsism is avoided while not sacrificing (1).
You’re aware IBM was not just complicit but essentially made the Holocaust possible with their counting machines? Had technicians permanently staffed in the fucking camps? The the numbers on people’s arms corresponded to IBM punch cards?
Are you aware of the world you live in?
I wasn't aware of that, no. I can say that it wasn't a feature of our history lessons in school, nor in various Holocaust documentaries I have watched, nor something that came up in conversation with friends and colleagues, nor have I personally seen it when it's been posted to HackerNews (if this is anything to go by: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=IBM%20holocaust&sort=byDate&ty...). I only learned about Oracle's complicity because it has resurfaced in coverage regarding the current ongoing genocide. But you are proving my point: what do I do now with this information?
> But you are proving my point: what do I do now with this information?
I would use it to question the premise
> we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide
which in reality I decided was obviously wrong the first time I heard it, many years ago. In fact, I don't think this concept of "complicity" is morally valid at all.
Continuing the red/blue pill metaphor from earlier, what you're describing is not dissimilar to Cypher's betrayal to be plugged back in.
Mass genocide happened plenty of times before the advent of computers, so I take issue with your assertion that IBM made the holocaust possible.
They were, and still are - multiple times a year. But THE german holocaust was the most effective by orders of magnitude. And they have technology to thank for that. Computing machines (primitive as they were) made it possible to track the status of each Jew. Railways made it possible to move them. Chemical plants produced the gas in the needed quantities. Industrial incinerators made it possible to dispose of the remains. They didn't just go down to Home Depot and buy a bottle of poison gas. They had a system end-to-end as efficient as any factory.
> Are you aware of the world you live in?
Certainly this world comprises many other things than the Holocaust and IBM's support of it. Perhaps your awareness is lacking if you think that is the main thing to be aware of in this world.
> Perhaps your awareness is lacking if you think that is the main thing to be aware of in this world.
I don't think that's what GP was saying at all.
Maybe say what you think they were saying? What is it with these maximally ambiguous comments?
To me "Are you aware of the world you live in?" suggests "If you don't even know this, you don't know anything. This is the first thing anyone should know". I'm willing to learng if they meant something else, but I guess that's asking a lot.
The point is that Oracle's actions are unremarkable in the context of the existing state of the world, and that corporations are generally not concerned with the morality of their customers.
This was, to my thinking, such a straightforward interpretation that it didn't bear making explicit; and your interpretation genuinely didn't even occur to me.
It doesn't surprise me that corporations [whose primary, if not sole concern is the profit motive] don't care about the morality of their customers. What I don't understand is why you're objecting to me voting with my wallet, something that's been a popular retort against progressive and humanitarian movements for at least the past two decades.
> What I don't understand is why you're objecting to me voting with my wallet
I did nothing of the sort.
I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.
The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
> I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.
That's a semantic distinction without a difference.
> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.
> We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now
a lot is worse now, but not shopping. on amazon some very specific items may be hard to find, and the search will throw a lot of crap at you, but you're still free to refine, compare and explore. finding exactly what you need and making an informed purchase has never been easier, and you get next day delivery (most of the time) plus exceptional return/refund policy and process. not sure about picking a, b or c? order all three, keep one, return the rest. i ofc don't (usually) do that, but i could. don't know how shopping could get any better/easier?
i don't like amazon as a company, it is evil and there is a lot to criticise, but the service and the value to the customer they provided has completely transformed shopping, for the better.
ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
I went to a camera store in-person yesterday for work. We needed a lens for a camera already purchased by our company, and we were able to shoot the shit with a super knowledgeable employee absolutely surrounded by lenses, frames, accessories, etc.
We ended up not purchasing anything due to some unknowns, but when my PM told me we'd just order what we need I told him if the price is remotely the same we should go back to the store a few blocks away because had I not spent 15 minutes chatting I would have wasted hours reading blogs/ads trying to figure out what I needed.
Frank and earnest question about using a company when you think they aren't a net benefit to society, especially when there are other options. I too have my reasons for thinking Goog, Amzn, and others are not good. I just don't use them. The other options seem great to me - I never long for what I'm missing. Momentum, habit, peer pressure, or something else going on?
> Frank Nd earnest question
What's the question?
i found that almost everything around me is evil, and after a period of hesitation i resolved to make the most of it.
That's a totally legit answer! I've heard that from quite a few friends. My personality (or something) nags me too much to do so, but I get it.
>ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
Dude, nearly everytime I'm at a shop that's what happens. Not all are top top experts, but generally they have a very good idea about their subject and perform their jobs as if they liked them.
But that's Norway, not everyone is so lucky to live here.
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
Urgh... kills me.
I have some ebay alerts for items for one of my hobbies (nothing at all to do with cars). Sometimes if ebay has nothing that matches my alert, I still get an email with spare car parts that I can buy.
And today I was looking for specific brand of wine for a friend on a bottle shop's website. I got 108 results, none of which were for the brand I was searching for, many of which weren't even wine either.
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
It's been noticed, just not put into words very often. And it's not as if anyone felt like they could do anything about it.
In the past year, I ended my Amazon Prime membership and started shopping at Target again for this reason. A few items I do still purchase on Amazon, and that has been eye-opening: Checkout is now a minefield of dark patterns, filled with buttons that would reactivate my Prime membership in one click. Is their goal to drive me away from the service?
> search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'.
Years ago Amazon intentionally nerfed their own on-site search into complete uselessness. A step at a time they removed the ability to exclude a term by prefixing a '-', then they removed grouping terms into a phrase either with quote marks or plus+signs. For years these all worked well. It's no longer plausible that the reason is to serve semantic search results, they could still include synonyms lower in results while respecting exclusion and phrases but that would make what's really going on too obvious.
The real reason they nerfed their search so bad I often have to use Google with "site:amazon.com" is simply so they can serve up whatever results are most profitable which vaguely semantically match any term. This is a big profit center due to all the 'marketing programs' they push on third-party sellers. Paying for these is virtually required to get on the first page of any popular search. Amazon has a huge inventory of such listings and selling you one of those listing is more profitable for Amazon, but assuming the price is the same, less profitable for the reseller due to giving Amazon even more of their slim margin. Since playing this game has become required, it raises the ASP of all products - another Amazon tax.
Through the Bezos era and up until around ten years ago, Amazon was "good", meaning their broad strategies and policies were generally a net gain for most buyers. Things Like allowing negative reviews and no-questions returns made me a fan and allowed Amazon to destroy all its competition. Since then they've gradually A/B tested their way into, IMHO, pure evil.
For consumers, the only real net gains Amazon still provides is massive inventory and faster delivery for Prime items (although you may have noticed they are now also strategically degrading Prime delivery consistency). Everything else about Amazon is objectively worse. Products are more expensive, search is intentionally broken, the site is rife with paid placements and dark patterns. And no one can compete because as soon as a new upstart offers search that works or lower prices by not forcing all sellers into high-margin programs, Amazon will un-nerf that specific enshittification just enough until the new threat is exterminated.
eBay search is still pretty decent about letting you exclude things and other 'power user' search abilities
One of the best Userscripts I ever made was for Amazon: It adds an explicit "results must include these search terms" input box as well as one to exclude results for particular terms. Saves me SO much time when I have to find something on Amazon.
Have you considered making that into your own shopping website?
You don't need warehouses or delivery drivers - you can make it place an Amazon order to the customer's address through the customer's Amazon account. (All you have to do is ignore the fact that Amazon doesn't want you to ask for other people's Amazon passwords.)
As bad as Google's searches have become, they still do a better job finding the book on Amazon when Amazon's search can't find a book when I put in the title and author's last name. It is common for "sponsored results" to include trousers when I am searching for a book.
> I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999
Maybe I just learned it’s ways, but I feel like I was ~satisfied with AltaVista… I think Google came to eat their lunch in part because they took search way more seriously than DEC did.
I still sometimes get "zero results" on general DDG searches, if I'm specific enough. Never on a shopping site, though.
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
My biggest frustration with google search is that it doesn’t. Keywords that I know are on millions of pages only return a handful of results.
It's called the Gruen Effect[0], and everything is becoming a product of marketing.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer
Yesterday I tried to buy a light bulb for my kitchen hood on Amazon. I searched for 130V 40W light bulb. I ended up buying a 120V one because I gave up trying to find the one I wanted. I think I'll run over to the hardware store next time.
Is there a difference between a 120V bulb and a 130V bulb?
I thought we basically had 110-130V North American voltage and 220-240V Euro and others voltage as the actual voltage you get from the grid varies within a range.
Yes, the 130 volt bulb lasts longer when operated on 120 volts. My family would buy these when I was kid.
Some probably non-LLM explanations:
https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs
https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-...
Yes, but that isn't a thing that is actually manufactured, due to the lightbulb cartel. And if it was manufactured, they'd label it as 120V, long-lasting, because no country uses 130V power.
You can't just will arbitrary part specifications into existence. You can't declare that you need a 67.53 ohm resistor and then search for that. They only make certain values.
Yeah no way theres a transformer stepping up the voltage in his hood.
Its 130V rated for safety but realistically hes getting like 115
Oh no a reranker which optimizes for pclick (bias to cheaper items) and profit (bid and margin)
I don’t think the forest is dark (obvious financial incentives) and I don’t think we’re pre-Google (as you said, you can literally still find what you want, USING GOOGLE, even)
To me its a bigger problem. The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase to cheap countries. You could pay $10 for the brand name of a simple product or get the 100% equivalent for $1 from a Chinese Knock off. So people felt ripped off and abandoned brands. (reasonable since the brands were keeping prices high artificially)
However that has lead to a massive drop off in quality and price/value ratio of all products. Now the brands and the knock offs are in a race to the bottom for the lowest quality product/profit ratio so there truly is no difference and no quality products below "luxury" tier exist anymore.
Even some high'ish tier brands shoes like Hoka/Ons shoes have major quality issues even though they exist at just below the "premium" price point. I had two pairs of the same Ons last year, one lasted 3 months and started falling apart the other pair is still going 1y later. I wore them roughly the same amount switching between them. I looked up online and it turns out both brands avoid long term production contracts to bank profits from the lowest bidder at expense of their own brand they built.
Market for lemons, it's called. When it's impossible for the buyer to know the quality before buying, the buyer has no choice but to price the item as if it's always low quality. Otherwise scammers will just sell low quality items at high quality prices and it'll work. But if the buyer is only paying low quality prices, high quality products can only be sold at a loss, and only low-quality products remain in production because they can make a profit.
How do you even know something is authentic on Amazon, and not a counterfeit? What with the return scams and whatnot. That's why I avoid Amazon for most things are aren't close to disposable. I feel like there could a niche for a site that only sells as authorized distributor. To cut down on things like counterfeit and made-with-toxic materials items, etc. So no fly-by-night "marketplace" sellers. But what do I know.
That was basically my point. You don't even know anymore even with a brand name. The second any brand gains traction they sell out quietly behind the scenes and rug pull the quality.
> The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase
Ironically I'd say that this was what firmly cemented the concept. Brands truly gained their power when they separated themselves from what they produce and the name providing it. Previously, brands were tied to the quality of their items. When they separated the idea, it enabled brands to become lifestyles and cultural signifiers, which skyrocketed the profitability of being a brand rather than a producer of a good.
Yes, exactly—the concept of Brand means hardly anything anymore. Certainly due partly to outsourcing like you say, but I think even more generally due to financialization. In a financialized world, brands become purely assets, which can be swiftly created and destroyed on (digital) paper, or packaged and sold to the highest bidder. The brand’s products aren’t the product any longer—it’s the brand itself.
Amazon and a lot of other big companies feel like the corporate embodiment of the "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" line from Clerks. We are not valued customers whose business forms the foundation of their success. We are obstacles that sit between them and the money in our bank accounts. They'd prefer to cut us out of the equation entirely, but failing that, they will do whatever it takes to overcome. The fact that they don't actually want us in the equation oozes through every bit of the process.
Google will just delete all data of a 200 billion dollar pension fund without blinking. This did happen, and somehow it still has customers.
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
I think many people noticed the change. However, when semantic search first came about, it was useful and not the only option. Being able to see items similar to my search term on Amazon was analogous to browsing products in the same aisle in a physical store, which was helpful when you wanted an item from a category but haven't decided on the exact one.
The enshittifying and infuriating difference now is that the choice of using semantic search have been taken away. It is often the only option, and the definition of things that are "semantic similar" is a mile wide. I appreciate semantic search when I have good use cases for it, but please give me the option to turn it off when I don't need it.
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I’ve encountered “no results” on DuckDuckGo at least half a dozen times in the last couple of months when I know there should be relevant results, and Google gives me relevant results (sigh; I think I had gone for more than a year without using !g). Most of these have been exact keyword matches.
Kagi is comparable to pre-semantic, no-ad Google. Because they don't have ads you just pay for the product. It's great.
"With Kagi you are the customer, not the product."
It's been true my entire adult life.
When I came to Canada almost 30 years ago, IT-job immigrants, let alone people who've grew up in this system were already doing 'buy real estate, rent it out, profit' and their day job was just a means to finance becoming a permanent rent seeker.
Pikachu surprise face that a culture that thinks rent seeking is great ends up doing it everywhere, all of the time, including Amazon.
> the platform will choose what you'll buy
Assuming they were any good at it. They can’t even figure out basic product design.
You cannot have the purchase funnels you describe without better UI/UX. Amazon’s is abysmal.
Very often people leave Amazon and boycott them entirely (like I do) because the experience is so awful across the board.
I don’t believe they are “guiding” anyone to anything. Amazon only became profitable after COVID when they forced everyone to shut down so we had to use Amazon. Everyone noticed that and remembers.
You put them on a pedestal.
Ever tried to login to AWS? Login. A regular login form. They can’t do it.
You might want to read some of their quarterly earning reports and research papers their teams submit. Your experience is not commensurate with financial reality.
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and housing assistance, but I'd be willing to bet that amazon would make back some of it in increased amazon purchases too. It'd be great if the government cracked down on corporations who use taxpayer money to subsidize their labor expenses
I've long felt that there needs to be a bill passed to charge companies $x additional tax each year where $x is the amount of government assistance their employees required in order to meet food/housing minimum standards. One way or the other, the companies that are making the rest of us pay for their employees to survive need to be funding these programs.
Or just increase minimum wage. 3x maybe?
Same thing, and simpler to do than making new law. I always prefer keeping tax simple!
Isn't it actually the government's fault for setting minimum wage below food stamp wage?
Force means "coercion or compulsion, especially w the use of threat or violence".
If "not paying someone x dollars" = force, then at this moment, I'm forcing 6 billion people to do something.
The force comes in at the other end, where we beat up people for not having X dollars. If you beat up and murder people for not having foo and we all just take this for granted and pretend there's nothing we can do about it, then we have no choice but to assign blame to the part we can actually comprehend - the choice of who gets foo.
Even the staunchest libertarians disagree with your understanding. Embarrassed that anyone holds or ever held this view, they have left you behind.
Embarrassed anyone on hackernews can't formulate an argument, resorts to ad hominem
Socialize the costs and privatize the profits is where all this regulatory capture has gotten us.
The new (to me) Amazon Haul storefront is (to me) hilarious. I was stunned when I first saw it: https://www.amazon.com/haul/store
I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Ships from third party" schemes, this feels like a new low.
Paired with the article, it seems to me like the natural conclusion is that the company wants to move away from distribution and towards pure rent-seeking, in the most blatant ways possible, trying to squeeze as much cash as possible from their name while it has any value.
> What does it mean that I'm the importer?
Hello! Another thing it means is that you are legally responsible for paying ... ta-dum ... TARIFFS!
Wow. Amazon Haul looks like the latest way to speed run heavy metal poisoning.
Imagine there's a best-selling toaster. Amazon can recommend it and many people will be happy buying it. Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm? To send a strong enough signal, it would probably need a level of sales that could only be achieved with some level of advertising.
Separately, I'd note that Amazon doesn't want high levels of returns (which it has to pay for in many cases), so they still try to herd people toward products that they will find acceptable. Might they not love them as much as some others? Perhaps, though this is a fine line to try to walk, and I'm not sure that Amazon is actually trying to walk it.
Shops used to curate their catalogs by in-house testing products from various suppliers. If a supplier comes up with a better toaster, they can send samples to the most relevant shops and convince them to stock it.
> Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm?
This is a solved problem. Recommendation algorithms aren't just "highest average rating", they take into account number of ratings, recent trends, etc.
Even if some ads improve this experience, Amazon is orders of magnitude past that threshold into hostility and toxicity. You have to scroll through pages of sponsored results to find anything worthwhile.
Same way youtube gets people to view new videos. By showing a few people the video and if they like it then show it to more people. Obviously for something as expensive as a product launch you'd weight it a bit more towards the new product than a youtube video but still.
It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
Enshittification is such a perfect word for all this. Cory Doctorow is a word magician.
There's also the less neologistic phrase "worse on purpose"
Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
I was recently looking for a cheap IOT camera in a specific form factor from aliexpress and the results were so irrelevant I had to develop alternative strategies like finding one good result and checking under its recommendations or image searching from the one good result to see other using the same picture.
I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. I hate the number of 10-packs of things I get where I only need one. (Luckily I live in a block of flats where there's a good community, so often I get those for free just by asking on our Signal group!)
> The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc.
So much agreement! I have a bunch of obscure parts like 99 wooden dowels from when I needed one and had to buy 100.
Screwfix is sometimes OK for this, but I still end up in situations like the above where I have 99 wooden dowels that will remain in my garage for all time.
(For what it's worth, I also completely agree with Amazon vs stores like John Lewis etc, I haven't bought anything from Amazon for years now, and definitely don't miss it at all)
A cheaper alternative is Argos for a lot of things.
Argos, Poundland, Tesco, Lidl…
Big surprise when I moved to Germany was that there's a Woolworth's brand here that survived independently to the one in the UK which closed decades ago.
> The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc.
So much nostalgia for these shops. A man with a posh, sparkling clean apron knowing exactly what you need or mean. In and out in under a minute or two having parted with just 30p
Screwfix are actually pretty close in terms of service. Their staff are pretty patient with people and quite helpful. They mostly only sell packs of things though (and wow fixings got expensive... anyway. And it's ironic that the "trades" brand of the group that owns B&Q has better customer service than B&Q...)
Spending 30p in a minute means the store's gross revenue including cost of goods sold is at most $18.00 per hour, which is already less than a living wage for one person.
30p back in the early 90s, I should have specified...
The shop also sold more expensive things like small appliances and hand tools etc
> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse.
"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. But there is value to show some noise in the search long term.
Another way to look at it is through the vail of ignorance. Suppose you're a manufacturer of air fryers, but don't know where you stand in terms of how competitive or popular your product is. Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Sure if you're the top 3 manufacturer, maybe you would prefer not to pay the tax. But if you're not, you'd much rather prefer the system in which you can.
Isn't that what independent reviews are generally useful for? To try all the options and share feedback for someone to make their own choice.
How do you get someone to review your product if you're one of N? Paid reviews? Not independent anymore. Paying money to get some exposure and sales is the best of all bad options.
Yes, if you can even get your product high enough on the rankings to make a sale.
The incumbent has a massive advantage, making it harder for a new (but better) product to get on the first page.
For every kind of product one might need to buy?
"The best" for many products is often static, on the level of decades. Better e-commerce websites than Amazon will curate away all the garbage and only show you the best things. At this point you can pretty much use the top 5 results from any Amazon search to rule out things NOT to buy.
There is basically no category of anything where there is something that is THE best, once you take buyer preferences and tradeoffs like cost, quality, time, brand, etc. into account.
>"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product ... Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?
Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rated one, at least until they get high ratings, and then can increase the price. If they're going to be losing money on marketing, it would be nicer if it goes to consumers.
This is a weird hack to avoid the obvious concept of "telling people your product exists".
You're also just one step away from suggesting it should be put higher up in the search results - which is the entire complaint!
If "the best" was stuck in 2005 it probably actually would still be better than what it says "the best" is today.
Amazon has turned the search ranking into a contest for who can give Jeff Bezos the most money. How is that an improvement on anything?
> Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?
Yes. I’d rather compete on quality and customer satisfaction than who can burn the most money on ads.
By making it almost necessary to buy their ads, Amazon is harming my margin.
I don’t hate all advertising, but I do hate this form, where it’s perverting search.
This also happens in physical stores. In Walmart and others, good quality and good price items are at hard to find, let alone notice places. That happens because lower quality more expensive products pay Walmart for better placement.
> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model
That's assuming two things -- user desires and valuation models are identical (they're not, even within a single product view)
and that the state of products is static -- Once a product is best there cannot be a new best in the future. You have to have buyers try new products, some of them disappointed, to plot the shape of what is best or worst. Charging companies a fee means they have to be really sure/serious that what they have to offer is market satisfying (else they're wasting their money).
What we really need is for consumers to stop being so short term thinking and buying the cheapest item (on BNPL no less) and for Amazon to be held accountable for how they penalize people who legitimately compete with them (imo an anti-trust issue).
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxl_lO15Ocg
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5otF7Bj5LxI
> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.
I am always surprised that people apparently think corporations want the best for their customers. They want the best for their shareholders. Sometimes the latter overlaps with the former, but mostly that's not the case.
I've tried to replace Amazon with other vendors where possible. You can get partway there, but half the time, my orders get delivered from an Amazon warehouse anyway. Smaller vendors have basically surrendered logistics to Amazon entirely. At least I'm not giving Amazon ad revenue if I don't order directly through them!
> When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place.
They’re entitled? By whose standards are “best air fryer” to be determined? Do all buyers have the same criteria for what “best” means to them?
I live in Italy, Amazon opened its Italian branch about 15 years ago. Initially it had a smaller catalog of products, with products sold almost entirely by Amazon. They were delivering packages in 3 days and the price was almost always much better than any other online or physical shop.
Over the years they largely improved the delivery time. Now if I am ordering a package before 4PM there is a high chance I will get it the next day in the morning. Prices however became higher and higher, at the point that for many products Amazon is not that convenient anymore: if you need home appliance (TV, dishwasher etc) other online or physical shops are now significantly cheaper. If you look sport equipment (e.g. climbing, mountain bike, hiking) the specialized shops are usually cheaper as long as you are OK to wait for longer delivery time and maybe combine 2 or more products to reduce the shipping costs.
I still find Amazon convenient during prime days and black Friday, and because of the large catalog with many alternatives and sometimes useful reviews (need a new shower head, a new mouse, a hole puncher, a tire for the bicycle...) but prices are not as good as they used to be. But if you need something in a hurry, the fact that you can order today and get it tomorrow is a big plus.
Amazon search has been terrible for as long as I can remember. Not to disregard the scourge of ads that has infested the results but I've been frustrated with Amazon search for almost 2 decades.
Oh sure, their search gives you the impression you can filter/sort but due to zero policing anyone can say whatever they want about their product and I have the feeling Amazon just sucks at this on top of the seller malice.
Just try to filter down to the dimensions you need, the connector you are looking for, the material you'd prefer and you'll be inundated with tons of items that share not resemblance to the filters you entered.
I only want X brand, here I hope you want to see results from Z, W, Q brands as well!
I only want items under 2ft wide, here are 4ft, 1ft, 6ft options!
I want only <1' cables, here are 12ft cables.
It's all a miserable experience. Often I skip the filters because if they are so bad at keeping out the trash then I worry I'll also lose legit options because I have zero trust in Amazon's ability to accurately filter.
I won't pretend running Amazon is easy but I'm constantly in shock at how absolutely terrible Amazon's website is to use. The number of UIs that are clearly optimized around data retrieval optimization instead of serving the customer is insane.
This is the virtual equivalent of manufacturers paying for premium floor/shelf space in a brick and mortar store. The way to avoid it is to ignore the sponsored results and do some actual browsing - just like comparison shopping in a physical store.
Really Amazon just has to overhaul their ratings system.
That ads are fine, it's not difficult to see what is labeled "sponsored".
What isn't fine is the hardcore gamification of reviews.
If reviews are fixed and you want to pay to advertise your 2-star hand mixer? Sure, but you are probably just paying to show off that you suck.
My favorite is when I leave a one/two star review, and the (always Chinese) merchant writes me, offering anywhere from $50 to a full refund if I change my review to 5 stars.
I do. I like money. Amazon doesn't seem to care when I report them.
And once the money clears my account, I change the review back. I have one on my desktop right now, awaiting a $50 gift card. I mean, I still care about people reading the reviews. They aren't completely immoral liars, like the company writing me.
As awful as Amazon has become, I still use it for the same reason I started using it many years ago: books.
It's the one place I can find all the books my kids need for school. You search with an ISBN and always find exactly what you want.
Other things I buy elsewhere.
Not identical problem, but similar. If I have just read "Dombey & Son" and want to read more Dickens, I search "Dickens" and get Monica Dickens? ok, more fool me. But if I search "Charles Dickens" and get "in the style of charles dickens" or "based on charles dickens" then I am very unhappy, especially if that "search" was actually clicking the blue highlight link under the specific volume of dickens I just read.
I asked an Amazonian about this once, and they said the algo worked for them in sales, because enough people go to the "in the style of" or actually want that and so I am SOL.
You would think there could be a search setting "specific author name == author, no extras" or something, if they wanted to maximise utility and choice.
But this is how ads work? The entire concept of programtic ads is based on bidding for the highest leverage time and placement with $$.. So even you have the best product and your competitor outbids you, they get seen more and most likely get bought more?
And even if you go into a normal retail shop with a product in mind, all the available options showcased can "distort" your actual intent. Because that's what the shop is designed to do: to showcase, and even in that showcase, some products are placed/showcased so they catch your attention.
I doubt anyone chooses to create shoddy products just so they have more money to market them..
Don’t supermarkets allow companies to pay for shelf position? They also allow companies to do paid promotional sales activations renting floor space.
It doesn’t seem all that egregious to me.
They do, and it's egregious.
Why doesn't the supermarket just raise the price on its own? If it thinks X brand sugar can be sold for $4.50 and the supermarket should pocket $1.50 of that, why not just do that instead of doing all the weird accounting tricks?
I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.
I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.
Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
Generally curious but a lot of the stuff I find on Etsy is the same crap from Alibaba/Amazon .. What are you buying from Etsy that isn't this?
I look for independent artists and craftspeople. I recent bought a pack of sci-fi posters for my apartment from an artists who designs it herself and who has an independent reputation.
My goal has now shifted to identify the thinnest intermediary between my dollars and the person doing the labor for the product/service I'm paying for.
This is an interesting goal. I would agree in general, but in the age of AI I'm feeling like much of the 'labor' being done is done by AI.
Posters, maybe. AI won't be knitting any time soon, though.
Etsy suffers from the same review astroturfing and product category crowding that Amazon does, but the product categories tend to be narrower so it's never quite as bad.
Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
It's Amazon bad, but with much worse customer service when anything goes wrong.
It depends what you are looking for. I find small batch or custom made items from small businesses.
Recently a nice wooden piece from a shop in Germany and an address sign for my yard from some place in the Midwest.
For some things you do see endless shops selling cheap Chinese imports.
Etsy is even worse for sponsored ads, way worse.
I'm not the GP but I bought a wooden lapdesk on Etsy that I use every day.
The person you responded to has a good point though. It does take some diligence on Etsy to avoid people reselling or drop shipping mass produced items.
Some of the prices are crazy too. I wanted 4 tenting legs for my keyboard, found some on Etsy for £100 total (no joke). 4 of the exact same item from AliExpress cost me about £4 including shipping.
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.
I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.
The fact is that Amazon has at least two customers here: you, the user trying to find an item to buy, and advertisers, likely trying to convince you to buy a lower quality product. Who wins? I'm guessing the advertiser. They are far more likely to have a sales contact, anyway.
> And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)
They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.
They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.
Getting something 36 minutes after ordering it is a nice surprise and great customer experience. I’m usually happy with a day or two.
After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.
The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.
It's not very customer obsessed when their email that they send me doesn't even have which items I've ordered.
That's because you probably are using gmail, and Google is reading your emails and harvesting your shopping history. That's why Amazon is being secretive: to deny Google that information.
I.e you’re saying AWS values hiding data from google more than customer satisfaction.
That doesn’t sound like being customer focused or obsessed at all.
I'm ok with Google having that information. Where is the checkbox to enable including useful details in emails?
I am not using Gmail. I like having the actual order details in my email so I can keep track of various orders without needing to go to Amazon's increasingly sluggish website.
Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.
I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.
I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.
> I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.
> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.
They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.
>I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
wrt to article insight, Benedicts Evans has been mentioning Ads being the major profit driver at Amazon in his newsletter since 2-3 years ago.
Alot of things are just fine, or more than fine, on Amazon (behemoth or not). If I know what brand I want, or I want a cheap version of something and the more or less guarantee if they screw up, it will be replaced or refunded, I absolutely would use Amazon. Some of the Amazon Essentials are a godsend if you cannot stand shopping. It is looking for new things, being unable to find exactly what I need without being overwhelmed, or not being sure of what of something to get, that gets me anxious.
Amused so many people here seem to be pushing etsy. I saw the same supposedly hand-made mugs on sale by hundreds of people on etsy a few years ago.
Yeah, same here. Shopping on Amazon is awful. Logistics and delivery, A-OK, but I don't want what they are selling.
I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.
It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.
As someone who sells actually custom created stuff on Etsy, it’s still definitely the best place for that but the alibaba and temu junk is growing on the platform.
This. I only have an Amazon account for a specific item - a dried soup mix that my mom who is off the grid, lives for. No PRime, no other purchases and if I could find the product elsewhere, I'd leave Amazon in a heartbeat. For the rest of it, my online shopping is mostly ebay. Been on it since the start and have had zero issues with any merchant or product (mostly used computer kit or repair items) that I've purchased.
But Etsy also has these ads, and I find them even harder to identify than on Amazon
I’m trying to get rid of Amazon but honestly it’s very hard. All vendor websites are shit, high friction, high bugs. Vendors consistently delivers significantly slower (like 2-3 weeks sometimes)
There is no single website that offers similar solution where my payment is saved and I can just buy and forget.
Only thing I’ve successfully replaced is grocery shopping.
In my experience, Etsy and Amazon are both following the same trajectory. Lower quality, lower value, fake and imitation products becoming more common, etc. On Etsy, it used to be the norm that a product would be unique, interesting, and probably handmade. Now, there’s a decent amount of 3D/screen printed junk that might also have some AI slop thrown in for good measure. The corporations have also moved in, just like they did with Airbnb.
The most common issue for me is what happened when I bought a custom dog bowl, thinking the ceramic was made by the seller. Later stumbled upon something similar and realized it was just an off the shelf bowl and the dog’s name had been painted on. That not worth nothing, and it was still probably nicer than what I could’ve gotten on Amazon, and maybe I should’ve asked before buying. But there’s just a lot of that, “make a quick buck” type of stuff and it’s not always obvious.
I deleted my Amazon account earlier this year. I have yet to feel like I am stuck and unable to get something. It has made me turn directly to the seller, so it then I know every single dollar is going to them, versus most of it going to the seller and Amazon getting a cut. It has also made me look closely at places in my city where I can pick things up. I've found a few new shops I didnt know existed because the default was Amazon. The only bummer was I lost about 5 years of Audible books, most I listened to once but a few were repeat listens. I will just pick them up on Libro when I get the desire to listen to it again.
Mostly I'm buying Amazon groceries because here in Boston if you don't have a car and access to Costco, wow are your local shops over-priced. Wholefoods, Star Market, and Trader Joes are all at least 25% more expensive.
Who do you think Wholefoods belongs to?
Oh, I know, but the prices that I get on Amazon are definitely cheaper than what I can get from the real Wholefoods 500 meters away. It's absurdist.
> Oh yea. Getting downvoted for saying the truth. So modern Hackernews
I didn't downvote you - and I agree with the sentiment that Whole Foods is also Amazon - but the meta complaining isn't beneficial to the conversation.
> other online platforms, including Etsy.
For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it.
All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
There are people who rent time at my local makerspace who sell on Etsy. Maybe the issue is that Etsy doesn't make it easy to find them?
Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined.
They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in either advertising spend or in the etsy-profiting metrics that drive algorithmic discovery.
It's a lot like Google search: the good websites are still there but now it's impossible to find them.
Etsy in particular has an incentive to fix this in ways that Google would never
Another thing that happens is your local shop will set up one Etsy store, the el cheapo junk stores may set up a huge number of different shops selling the same set of products.
This, too. Amazonification/Enshittification
The best part about not using Amazon is I get to get my stuff quicker, and I can see/feel it. Buying clothes off Amazon is basically the worst thing ever, for instance.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
Amazon built their own in-house logistics network because UPS et al. weren’t cutting it. They offer one-hour delivery for a lot of basic items where I am and it’s not even a particularly urban area. I think in urban centers those same items have 15 minute delivery. They are also the only ones who will consistently deliver on Sunday, when your local store might not even be open.
There are still lots of good reasons to shop local, but I’m not sure speed is the best reason.
I havent bought anything on Amazon for 10 years. Sure the local prices are infrequently higher but with 20%+ inflation over the last half decade comparison shopping is pretty much dead. Glad to support my local places or find an alternative or just live without whatever.
If you have a Costco nearby, highly recommend for the products they carry. I pay for the executive membership, and also ship products to where ever I need using their online shopping.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
Is the Costco shipping good / good inventory / similar or same as in store prices? Should I consider it if living in a city like ny?
I live in central nyc, been only a few times to a Costco, and had no idea they even do any shipping! I assumed that part of all those good prices is the smaller selection, large minimum quantities, and that you have to get yourself there with a car to get it in person.
Costco shipping is "free," but the prices on the website are more than in the store. I'm pretty sure it's based on weight; heavy stuff has a more pronounced markup. But, it saves you a trip, and the prices are low to start so it still may be significant savings. There's also a web-only deals section for clearing out inventory (I picked up some Philips Hue lights for half off).
I don't purchase from costco.com regularly, but the selection is generally the same as in-store and a bit more. The shipping is free, but slower than Amazon and faster than a couple weeks.
There is ~10-15% markup for Costco online delivery orders vs in-store prices.
eBay is my first go-to.
publicsurplus.com has everything a person might need and you are supporting local government.
You can find yourself a nice laptop for cheap. "It's got a cop CPU, an i5 10th gen. It's got cop RAM, cop SSD, cop 12v power input."
Fix the cigarette lighter
New to me.
I love that Perplexity just beat them in court because AIs are at least one hammer that might smash this bullshit. It's so sad, Amazon is chasing every short-term dollar at the expense of long-term success. I have also been moving my purchases away from them - might as well buy direct from the Chinese sellers rather than use Amazon as a middleman.
Etsy is full of AI and temu aliexpress slop; how do you avoid it?
I would love to support mom and pop stores if they don't charge 25% more than amazon. Here, in NY buying from small store means getting ripped off.
Yeah, those moms and pops are ripping us off, living like… well, not like Bezos.
So Bezos has produced a more efficient option and was rewarded for it? I already said I like Amazon, you don’t have to convince me
You are assuming all moms and pops are poor and barely thriving. This isn't case with many stores. I have worked as clerk and I know the margin.
I am sorry, but I will not buy 20 cents water at $2.
If it is only 25% more, you are NOT getting ripped off. Mere economies of scale and purchasing power yield Amazon more than 25% lower costs. the mom & pop stores you accuse of ripping you off likely have even slimmer margins than Amazon, even at their prices.
Yes, all of us who are not wealthy must have an upper limit to what we can support, and maybe 25% is over your limit, but please don't ignorantly accuse them of ripping you off when you clearly know nothing of the costs of vastly different scales of business.
Sounds like the economy of scale option produced better results for consumers :)
There are a lot of cases where I go direct-to-vendor. Particularly for niche products such as supplements and men's cosmetics, it is easier to find one or two trustworthy distributors or manufacturers who have most of what I want.
There has been a lot of consolidation in this space. Part of that means that independent webstores closed up and moved exclusively to Amazon. If they did not close up shop, they now use Shop/Shopify or a similar SaaS, which streamlines sign-ups, sign-ins, and checkouts, for better or worse. All the better if you've got PayPal or Apple/Google Pay.
I've noticed that a lot of "click and mortar" stores have really abysmal product on their physical shelves. Like, it's discontinued, or all the wrong sizes, subtly defective, or just undesirable. It's like their stores are kind of dumping grounds, and it makes sense, because the sort of person in 2026 who gets in a car, and shops in a store, and grabs stuff uncritically off the shelf is not your most discerning or astute shopper.
Target's shopping experience remains better than most. Their stores include everyday needs like groceries and medicine, so I can meet a lot of my needs by dropping in. Furthermore, their app-based shopping (marketplace) is pretty good too, so if I need housewares delivered or something, or I need to look up something and find it right now, in-store, their app is right there. And their shopping carts now have little dedicated slots to drop in your smartphone next to the cupholders.
The best online shopping is Office Depot/OfficeMAX. They've shrunk their retail footprint, but their online store is still a non-marketplace, and really good for buying the kinds of things they sell. That includes some non-intuitive buys, like you can find kitchen supplies, because they stock many breakrooms for small/medium businesses. Good place for electronics and accessories and art supplies, even if you are just comparison-shopping. Their delivery is rapid and often just comes from the nearest store!
Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home.
Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to rent a car to go pickup my package.
Amazon has absolutely nailed the delivery here. They looked at how people struggle with online orders and streamlined it completely. It’s such a blessing not to have to deal with delivery drivers anymore.
If Amazon charged €10 extra per package I would still order with them.
For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in the world by allowing alternate stores to keep going.
eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.
Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.
Why use an LLM for something that is a 5 second Google? Google Products is right there in the top. Forums will advice you on alternative products.
Am I getting old? I feel like a dinosaur still Googling things.
Google's search results defaulting to starting with an LLM; and by the power of SEO, so are many of the search results themselves.
Having to add "reddit" to get genuine results was already a meme 3 years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY&pp=ygUXZ29vZ2xlI...
At this point in time…
…you've got to figure that Google is just as disgusting as Amazon in the ads/search dept.
LLMs seem positively naive in that regard. Just, you know, simply suggesting what their subsumption of the internet suggests.
(For now anyway.)
Doesn’t ChatGPT also recommend products from their advertisers first?
In my house we have something from Amazon show up several times per week. They usually deliver when they say they will (often the same day), returns are a breeze (occasionally they refund us and don't want the item back), and I don't think I've ever had an issue with counterfeit items.
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have.
I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.
Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s.
Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.
What a strange and pretentious comment.
They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
Not only are they mutually exclusive, the current neoliberal regime has dismantling the welfare state as its explicit goal.
Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
Jokes on you, in my part of Europe I don’t have access to public healthcare, I don’t have mandated vacation, I don’t have a pension system. And I can’t even have a consumerist phase apparently since car parts are so hard to acquire.
This was something I would have never understood living in the US until I moved to France 4 months ago. And yeah, as much as I dislike the company, those lockers are clutch.
Package delivery is pretty good when you live in a country with a standardized address system, large homes and where the delivery driver can park in front of your home.
However if you live in a historical city center where your address is the equivalent of “That small door if you go up two stairs behind the old tavern” then package deliveries plain suck. Especially since you don’t have the “village postmen” anymore. You have ten delivery companies and none of them have fixed routes.
I live in one of those places (Copenhagen) and I prefer the local online shops, since they offer all the delivery choices.
I always choose delivery to the convenience shop on the opposite corner. It's open late, and picking up a parcel takes about a minute.
I cancelled prime this year. It no longer had any value. It's more expensive but shittier in every way.
And with adverts!
did that already years ago :)
I live in Bellevue so by supporting Amazon I'm supporting a local business. It's hard to imagine replacing most of the things I get from the site with someplace else. (Though it'd be nice to have a Micro Center.) I've even started getting more grocery products as Safeway/QFC/Fred Meyer up their prices, and the Redmond Fred Meyer closed which had the best produce. Etsy is mainly useful to me for the occasional copyright-infringing merch.
I wonder if people who live in DC think the same about their federal tax dollars, it’s roughly the same flavor of “local”
Just going off the "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION" license plates, I'd guess not. Federal tax dollars are spent according to the whims of literally everyone else in the country except them.
It's a local business to nearly everyone in the US. Anyways, it's not a local shop as the person you replied to called out.
Shopping at Amazon perpetuates the monopolization and consolidation of players in the economy. That means less competition. That means less incentive to improve the value they provide.
Seems pretty clear to me that shopping with Amazon makes things worse for everyone in the long run.
Worth mentioning that Google has the same tax in Google Maps.
It is bad for the same reasons that the Amazon Tax mentioned in the post is bad…
Many times I search for a restaurant like McDonalds and the top result won’t be the one nearest to me…it will be a sponsored result for one that is farther away from me.
Pretty wild that Google does this. It’s bad for people. It’s bad because instead of picking the best choice to be the top, Google is showing a worser choice for money.
The same reason why this blog mentions that the Amazon Tax is bad.
I can see a simple solution to this problem. STOP BUYING FROM AMAZON!
I do, you can too.
This assumes that people only (or at least) mostly depend on Amazon's search results' ordering to decide which products to buy. This is not true, at least not for everyone. I, e.g., visit review websites like Wirecutter to decide. Something tells me I'm not the only one.
Advertising may introduce a stranger. But charging a merchant to meet his own customer is highway robbery with a receipt.
lol a customer literally types in “Seth Godin” on the internet and gets to the product. But for some reason Amazon sponsored ads is a toll booth BLOCKING the merchant from meeting the customer unless the merchant pays 1 dollar???
How exactly is Amazon preventing the customer from meeting the merchant? What is the precise mechanism?
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place)"
I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.
Yes. Technically, there are situations where the air fryer which is best for you and the air fryer that makes Amazon the most money are the same. However, with the number of airfryers on Amazon it seems safe to assume this is a rare coincidence.
Only very tangentially related of course, but for all of that money going into search/ads/targeting, etc., searching 'shirt without stripes' on amazon today still returns shirts with stripes.
Per the classic https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes
> It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft.
An economist would not read past this first sentence.
Paraphrasing:
> Advertisement serves to increase purchase of the inferior product.
> The best product, which previously didn't require ads [on Amazon] now must pay Amazon to compete for eyeballs.
Advertisement, when successful, increases the purchasing of any product, generally. That the best product is subject to this effect and competition has nothing to do with Amazon or technology.
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse."
This is it.
I think the point of this piece is that advertising ruins platforms. Maybe so but Amazon is hardly the first platform to be ruined by it. The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus.
Subway platforms are filled with ads and force us to think about upcoming sales and broadway shows.
Television is full of ads and makes us think about all kinds of things we don't care about.
Restaurant menus advertise the items at the top of the menu to the detriment of the items in small print down below.
Memes of all kinds live or die by their attention fitness. If a book, play, or video game fails to get enough attention it dies, goes out of print, never makes it to broadway, and never gets ported to the new system. So if there is a way to cheat the attention system by paying a little money to push the thing in front of a few more eyeballs, makers and publishers are gonna do it.
Advertising is fundamentally un democratic because it assumes an imbalance of power - the power of those who control the publishing, the power those who can pay more.
> The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus.
this is really bad comparison
a subway platform ad doesn't dictate the way consumers use the subway.
a restaurant does not monitor the effectiveness of the ads in their menus, analyse their industry and rip off their product with an in-house brand (amazon basics)
amazon is not a marketplace, it is a surveillance platform built to allow amazon to take ownership of more and more markets
to say this is just a problem with ads is defeatist instead getting real tangible change
> If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
At least ads give the sellers a chance to compete for eyeballs 'legitimately'. The same marketing budget will not just vaporize if there is no ad space. It will be spent on fake reviews and even fake customers.
People who hate ads don't realize buying ads is the least evil way to compete for customers' attention.
I moved from the US to Australia recently, and Amazon isn’t really a thing here. Yes, it exists, and it is heavily marketed, but the range available in the store is at a guess less than 1% of what’s available in the US store. I occasionally go to amazon.com.au to look for things, have the same issue having to wade through irrelevant slop in the search results, find nothing suitable, and leave.
And then I do what it seems most Australians still do — go to a mall, or visit a specialty retailer, or use a specialty retailer’s clunky website and find exactly the thing I need and order it there and get it a few days later.
It’s quite refreshing to go out on the shopping streets or to the malls, and see many people out and about shopping. Likewise, the staff in stores are well-informed and helpful, and make the shopping experience pleasant and efficient.
Amazon is why we can’t have nice shopping experiences in the US.
I can't comment on the economics of it but amazon search is awful, and I think it's by design, not just by design though.
I was recently searching for some draw runners of a certain fixed size. Just cheap ones for some drawers I'm making for a workbench.
Found some cheap ones but not the correct length, but it made me realise something; If I sorted by price low to high the cheap ones did not show on any of the results pages. Amazon was purposefully showing me more expensive products.
I took some info from the cheap ones, searched for that, and the ones I wanted showed up in the search.
I wonder if anyone has trawled all of Amazon, and made a better search tool that doesn't try to rip anyone off?
Anyway, I am starting to find products cheaper outside of Amazon, including p&p.
Isn't it funny that marketers are usually the first people to complain about paying for marketing?
FWIW - I agree with the premise of the article, but I have to say - the reason these types of practices are acceptable in American culture is exactly because of prominent "marketing gurus".
I'm hoping AI will disintermediate most retail and we'll finally get an aggregator that isn't going to add a tax on both sides of the market.
"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right? I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to target a query, they'll eventually need to target a vector and its neighborhood, and there will be some greater opacity facing advertisers trying to match "middle-income US users shopping for airfryers who have product height limits posed by kitchen upper cabinets" or something.
Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.
Well same people had expected self-service restaurants, self-pay terminals will cause no tip. And even more fun future robotic servers can just work without expecting/asking for tips.
Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".
Competition and Open models will keep AI providers more honest - Google and Amazon are monopolies so they can enshittify and users have no recourse.
I'd believe that if this article wasn't an obvious counter example to this.
People go where the mindshare is. It doesn't matter if its ad-ridden drivel and slop, it just needs to be popular.
The number of people who use OpenAI's products because "ai == chatgtp [sic]" in their minds is immense. Just like how to a ton of people, "online shopping == amazon".
I'm not arguing Amazon or OpenAI will always have this role, but while they have that the benefits of this position is immense.
Unfortunately, Cuisinart is that year’s official air fryer sponsor of ChatGPT so you’re getting that one!
and what stops the amazons of the world from paying the ai provider, and getting your ai to buy from them instead of the best deal? How are you going to check and verify you got the best deal?
In the recent past, there was a browser extension called "Honey", which purported to find and apply the best coupon code for you when you online shopped. Turned out they were actually (amongst other things), in cahoots with the shops by ensuring that you get only a modest discount, rather than the best available coupons (and this was paid for by the shop).
How much do you think the ai providers will take as a cut for that?
I have no doubt this will work out even less well than your typical SEO marketing spam site in the offering the best choice for you. AIs recommendations will be those of the highest bidder. Which will also be the lowest quality product they can get away with.
Always best to search across Amazon, Ebay and Walmart. Vendors sell the same stuff across all three channels.
Haha, that's the classic thing with platforms that have demand aggregation. They extract a lot of stuff. DTC, Telehealth, all these things end up paying Meta and Google a large fraction of their revenue. Same with Stripe et al. The idea is to take a rake on all spending. It puts you in an unfathomably strong position. It's why Visa and Mastercard are such good businesses.
To get something in front of someone you need to do some work. These guys have the people so they charge you to show it to them. I'm realistically not going off Amazon. If you want to list the ebook on your website maybe I'll buy it there, but if you do a physical copy your 'tax' is going to Shopify. That's how it is.
If you are living in Germany I can not recommend https://geizhals.de/ enough. It is "just" a price comparision website, but it features most relevant online stores for me, annd more importantly their filters are just amazing and allow you to find products extremly efficient.
lots of people here defending amazon blindly seem to be unaware of the full picture of how amazon ads works in the context of the marketplace.
the point is that, if airfryer B is rival of A, and B buys ads (to let amazon show B ahead of A even if they searched for A), and A doesn't buy ads, then if B resorts to marketing to lower the quality just enough to compete, then all the quality focus of A will not end up increasing their sales.
more importantly, to have a good view on which products are good which one are the best is not available inside of amazon that easily. reusing sku, tricking people into buying inferior ones does not impact amazon in any way since return costs are paid by the fba vendor, or seller.
I'm sure that's very annoying for A Inc. It's probably more annoying than the slotting fee they paid Target, or the wholesale discount Walmart demanded, because "we only have room on the shelf for 3 brands" feels like more of a real constraint than "only 3 brands can be the top 3 search results".
Is it worse for me as a consumer? I'm not convinced.
Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
Even without the ads, Amazon search is abysmal. It seems to ignore half the words you enter. I often resort to using Google or ChatGPT to find items on Amazon which I know are there, but which their search box doesn't surface.
I searched for "cayenne" and accidentally bought the hot pepper product that came up which was not cayenne.
After going mildly buckwild on amazon after 3 years of not ordering a single thing (after a move to the country) I let the free month of prime I was using expire. This, and the counterfeit product I got (and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded) was decisive. I'll try again in 5 years.
> and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded
anecdata and all, but i've had the exact opposite experience - I've never spent more than a couple of minutes getting a refund, and it's always been less time and effort than returning something to a B&M store.
I imagine most readers haven't tried tiktok shop (or similar Chinese consumer shopping platforms).
ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective.
Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chinese EV ban).
He will likely be successful in doing this and allow the US to slide further into modern technological irrelevancy at his own benefit.
I have used this shop, but I do not agree that the experience is a good one. It is abysmal -- the standard for tiktok shop / aliexpress / temu is to offer you all sorts of "deals" that never actually apply. "Oh, you picked this item? Pick another four items and all of them are FREE!!! FREE!!! Also you have to buy a fifth one. Oh, and this only activates once you've spent more that $100. FREE!! FREE!!!"
Way worse than Amazon because at least Amazon is just showing you products and telling you how much they cost.
Do you have some insight into in what areas it’s better and how that is?
Its hard to pin down specifically. As a general rule: When I land on the homepage of the TikTok shop, without touching my screen I _generally_ see something that I am interested in buying. Its like it predicts what I am there to search for, and its quite accurate.
On the Amazon homepage that has never happened. It usually just shows some banner ad for prime day, new amazon tv show/movie, then maybe 4 little thumbnails of the last product I searched for or whatever. I have to initiate the shopping experience, I have to pique my own purchasing interest.
I’ve bought some stuff off there and can tease out some aspects, though they may be after the fact rationalizations of subconscious effects.
The first is price. The stuff is cheap, as in so cheap I know it will be terrible and I still sort of don’t care. It’s $2, if I only use it twice I got my moneys worth.
That makes it super easy to hit Buy without thinking much.
The second is that they appear to target verticals that don’t have a natural ceiling to sales. I only need one microwave, so they won’t sell me that. They do sell a lot of apparel, decorations, toys for adults (crappy 3D displays, not dildos), stuff where you don’t think “eh, I already have one though”.
The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really. Swipe to next video, see it’s an ad, hit buy, confirm Apple Pay pop up, scroll to next video. You can decide you want something, buy it, and be on your next video in 15 seconds. It’s so fast it almost blurs the line where I’m not sure if I’d call it shopping or entertainment.
The last is that they’re really good at luring consumers to start selling on there. The ads for stuff tend to be sort of home made and low quality, which makes it seem attainable for your average person. That tends to mean a huge selection. I had a buddy that randomly decided to sell stickers on there just based on watching other people do it (no idea how that went, I didn’t ask)
> Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them
No reason to get congress involved when you can have the president suspend duty-free de minimus with executive authority.
I hate videos when shopping. Videos are not skimmable. I don’t want to watch and listen to a salesperson sell the product to me. I want at least a modicum of individual agency and choice. I already skip all product videos on Amazon. I hate the product images too as they have become too salesy and they sometimes no longer even show important facts printed on the packaging itself (like the ingredient list or Nutrition Facts / Supplement Facts).
Fair; While I can only speak to TikTok shop (as its the only one I've interacted with), the videos typically take the place where product photos would be on the product page. A swipe dismisses it and its replaced with the product photos. The core browsing experience does not show videos in lieu of product photos from what I have seen.
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum. I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad. Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
I’m surprised that anyone would love Amazon so much that they resort to using third-party search so they can continue buying from Amazon. Rather than just shopping elsewhere!
There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.
Amazon purchased all of the companies/sites that handled the used book market. You cannot escape the clutches of Amazon if you're a book nerd like me.
Eh, for me it's not about love, it's about no other retailers carrying what I want, at a price point I'll pay, with an easy return policy and easy checkout. I'm willing to put up with a lot of crap to find that, apparently.
To be clear, when I do use LLM for search, I don't limit it to one site.
Amazon's logistics are a cut above, both in terms of turnaround time and their drivers actually knowing how to deliver to my house.
It’s wild. I was trying to find a cheap bookshelf with a specific style the other day. Firstly, I couldn’t filter by exact width. It autogenerated a width range (like 24-30”) which was different on subsequent searches and several inches away from what I wanted.
Second, I found a product I liked but was the wrong size. As far as I could tell, they can’t even show you recommended similar products. They show you what other people clicked on or bought in the same order. But not just actually similar products in the same style.
I looked at well over 1000 listings when looking for a new desk. The filters are sick joke. This was pre-llm, today I'd write something to scrape the results and parse the product pages/images to filter out the crap.
This plus the login-walled reviews is unfortunate because once I stopped buying from Amazon I'd continue to go there to browse before buying elsewhere.
The amount of review spam is so high that for a good portion of products the reviews are useless.
They also keep making it more annoying to even get to and read the reviews. It feels like it gets more hidden at the bottom of the page every few months. What a shame! Imagine how useful it could be.
One reason they force lots of scrolling is to put friction between you and the more-trustworthy Sort By Recent and Critical Only buttons.
Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.
That's the real issue
First you create the value, then you capture it...
This is simply, a monopoly. Whatever mechanism they came up with to squeeze the final dollars out of the system, such a system would exist because they can.
This reminds me of SABRE preferring American Airlines flights see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_syst.... Back in 1984 this "Preferential display" was considered illegal by the US government. How times have changed....
In Europe, it led to the creation of the competing Amadeus system which did not keep display preferences and now dominates the market.
Similarly, this is also why Google stopped enforcing trademarks years ago. It allows more people to bid on terms, increases competition, increases CPCs & of course pads their bottom line.
Same reason why the top ad on Google when you search for a brand is for the brand itself -- "brand bidding" is a thing, and if you don't bid on ads for your own brand, a competitor will. If Google can do it why not Amazon!
I do not understand why sellers accept this practice. I'd assume it would run afoul of some trademark law but the distinct lack of lawsuits indicates that either the legal grounds are shaky... or the sellers themselves find some advantage in it.
The income tax in UK has this quirk: once you fall near the top tax bracket, you retrospectively lose all tax-free allowances you could have availed, had you not fallen in the top tax bracket.
Likewise, once corporations blow past a revenue cap, they shouldn't be eligible for lower rate of corporate tax. If the US is any cautionary tale (it always is), it's a moral imperative not to let corporations get too big. Letting corporations grow big and still avail tax cuts, is like feeding your own cancer.
In reality though it isn't implemented as you described. In reality it is merely that there is a 62% marginal rate from 100k to 100k + 2x the personal allowance.
They do this with sole traders who face a £14k (~$20k) slab tax bill (VAT) if they go from £85k to £85,001 (~$100k). The outcome has been near total depletion of skill tradesman "mate" apprenticeships. Since such people (not being totally stupid) take 3 months off per year or work 4 days per week and turn down jobs.
it's very attractive to try and build a progressive tax system that swings too far the other way too. Economically some sort of tax free base and a flat rate is the best but politically it's way better to attack here and carve out these exemptions... the biggest winner is tax prep software.
"Your margins are my opportunity"
The great Bezos said ones and people, companies, stock market loved it. Now new CEO is noticing Amazon customers also have some margin and hence more opportunity for Amazon.
Lower and lower S/N on the internet.... and businesses adding to the N so they can charge for the S. If enough become aware of this, they will vote with their $$ and Amazon (et al) will lose market share. But sadly the TicToc generation doesn't seem to notice :-()
if your highest performing ad is against searches for literally the title of your book, isn't that a signal that you don't need to buy ads? people are searching for your book. they will buy it whether you advertise or not. so why by the ad?
this is framed as amazon doing something wrong, but it sounds like what's actually happening is that his marketer is wasting money. of course amazon is going to accept money if you give it to them for the things they're already doing for free. why shouldn't they?
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
Theoretically. Amazon doesn't give a shit about well being or enrichment of it's employees. Every single one of the them. They tried to squeeze the productivity and since the Stock has been doing well, many employees have made a reasonable money. But forget the well being or profit sharing aspects with the employees.
> paying Amazon a dollar to show you an ad for the book you searched in the first place.
This is the worst part.
Google Ads are the same. I pay about $2 per click for my EXACT PRODUCT NAME search, otherwise 6 other competitor ads are shown on top of google search before the actual results
I'm having trouble understanding how this differs from traditional ads - even pre-Internet...? Didn't manufacturers pay to get premium shelf space in a store?
In the author’s specific case of books, publishers always paid ‘coop marketing’ dollars to booksellers to get ‘face out’ placement on shelves, ‘end cap’ positioning where copies of the book would be positioned on the aisle-facing shelves used to entice people into browsing a section of the store, as well as more for table placements and window features. And that’s on top of just having to discount the price deep enough to get the seller to buy in stock of the book in the first place, as well as further eating margin reductions to induce sellers to offer discounts.
All these same incentives are at work in supermarket aisles and big box stores, shaping which products you see and are offered at what price. You think if you walk into Best Buy and ask them to show you laptops, the one they push you to look at is going to be the ‘best’ on offer? Or is it perhaps the one which is set up with the best sales staff commission this month?
Distribution channels have never been neutral champions of the consumer.
There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store.
Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences.
If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it.
Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens.
Only Amazon knows how many affiliate links lead to actual sales, how many ebook pages are actually read, what the CTR on ads really is, and so on.
> There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store.
> Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences.
20+ years ago the exact same accusations were leveled against Walmart.
I still don't see the difference.
> If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it.
Amazon is giving many people a platform they had no other hope of having. Years ago, for a while, I got deep into Amazon selling. An average Joe who is a full time employee can quickly set up a business, get some manufacturing contracts in China, and start selling on Amazon.
In the old days, that Joe would never be allowed on Walmart's shelves.[1] So it's equally true with Walmart: That average Joe would not be able to get a human to help him, because the humans would exclude him to begin with. Amazon is giving the average Joe more opportunity than they ever had. We're merely criticizing them for not giving those kinds of sellers great service.
Even for those who could get into Walmart - they made capricious decisions all the time that would impact your sales. If you were a small seller, you had no power over Walmart.
> Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens.
If the goal of your comment is to list all the reasons Amazon sucks - there's no need. I could write that list for you - I try not to buy from Amazon myself. The submission is specifically about their ads, as was my comment.
[1] Arguably, that's a good thing, and Amazon's lack of curation is one of the reasons I don't shop at Amazon, but it is besides the point here.
The article mentions that the "best" airfyer seller also has to place bids on their names / keywords, but I don't think there's a best, just like there's no best shoes. There are so many niches that exist in products — does it fit in a tight space, what's the shape, what's the air-frying technique, do the buttons work with oven mitts — so there are different bestsellers in each subcategory.
An idea I've played around with in the past is to have some sort of law that limits how much revenue a company can make from ads. For example, a law that says "A company cannot make more than 10% of its gross revenue from ads or selling customer data".
This kind of law would wreak havoc for certain companies (and content creators). However, just like prediction markets, ads distort and ruin the very thing they are trying to optimize.
> This study argues that an ecommerce site with search ads actually sells fewer items than the same site without ads.
Shouldn't the very same marketing companies buying these ads know this? Why are they misleading their clients?
It looks less like an advertising but more like a rent extraction with a casi toll on commerce that ultimately gets passed on to consumers
Imo it's all about all ads. And then it is about all middlemen.even real estate agents make ir more expensive for both - seller and buyer
That's one tax. The other tax is that companies raise their prices elsewhere so that they aren't lower than the list price on Amazon, because that would violate Amazon's policy.
In the product search results game, I imagine Google and Amazon will soon have competition from AI chatbots linking to product pages in response to user queries. Also, OpenAI is getting into ad business. Seems like that will add a different place where book publishers could run ads? They will also need to optimize their web pages to be useful to bots looking for information.
"...the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place."
No company is "entitled" to any sales.
The point is that, because of their product’s merits, they would organically be the top ranked search result. But due to advertising, they have lost that spot and now either must give up sales or also advertise.
I understand the point. I simply argue that it's an ill-conceived point, based on various definitions of the word "entitled":
1. qualified for by right according to law
2. having a right to certain benefits or privileges
3. having a right or legitimate claim to something
No company is qualified for sales according to law, or has a right to sales, or has a legitimate claim on sales. Sales must be earned by besting the competition.
No company is "entitled" to any sales.
For a while Amazon was good at discovering new books to read. Nowadays my ad-blocker blocks everything except for the book I am directly navigating to from the page. No discovery of new books is happening for me there anymore.
Another place to discover new books was Goodreads. Bought and left to rot by Amazon.
I don't buy many books anymore.
You could... change your adblocker? I use uBlock Origin, which doesn't block "customers also bought" widgets at all.
Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either.
There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like?
But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail.
The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.
> The world would probably be a healthier place economically if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores and independent shops.
I don't know what you mean by that. I used to live in a tier 2 European city pre Internet and there were lots of things that were a pain to buy. We'd often have to check multiple stores. Specialty hobbies were served by one or two shops that you had to drive to. I remember having to take the train to a different city to buy a memory card for my computer. There was real consumer cost and societal cost.
The warehouse and online order model is economically a lot more efficient. The real question is what to do with the surplus it generates, make Bezos richer or something else?
Also prevents food deserts and other dark societal patterns.
I have never once heard someone try and claim Amazon is why food deserts exist...
Only a magically perfect network would do that. There's no force to "correct" food deserts.
OTOH, Amazon grocery delivery in cities does do a LOT toward reducing their impact on poor people (who are not-poor enough to pay for Amazon delivery) (which might be cheaper than bus tickets). Hate on Amazon and Bezos all you want; some good comes out of it.
This is so true!
I rarely order anything from Amazon these days, maybe once or twice a year. Everything feels like a rip-off or fake. I don't trust the search function at all. Nor do I trust the customer ratings. The only exception is if I buy from a brand I already know that has its own brand-shop, owned directly by the manufacturer.
I think Ads improves discovery as well as is the most profitable part of amazon - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/marketplaces-airbnb-future-foun...
Amazon is nearly worthless to find anything anymore. Same items repeated dozens to hundreds of times, with minor changes, but all pointing to the same item.
It's like GOogle when ads outweighed your search results. Amazon has become a garbage pit.
The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great.
It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.
This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.
This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.
Google ads work exactly the same way.
As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.
If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.
("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)
This is by far the most annoying thing about Amazon to me. They clearly are doing a disservice to their consumer with this. Many times I go straight to google to search for Amazon products, which leads to better results
I respect Seth quite a bit and have been an avid reader for two decades, but this post struck me as odd.
It reads as though he’s just discovering how the digital advertising industry works (and he's a marketer) ... not just Amazon, but also Google etc.
And Apple. Unsurprisingly, the brand name of my app converts best, except Apple wants an outrageous $3 per click or something. Of course, I simply live with no ads and trust in people finding the correct download link if they want my app and not the competitor bidding for my brand keyword.
Respectfully, this is nonsense. The consumer experience I have is that Amazon sells products at lower prices with better quality, support, variety and transparency than pretty much every other store out there.
Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience.
If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t?
Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there.
Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel.
Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.
I think Ad's may be the best and most profitable part of Amazon.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/marketplaces-airbnb-future-foun...
Do yourself a favor and get a real domain name if you're going to promote it :-)
Amazon has many decisive conflicts of interest:
- improving search results vs less ad revenue
- promoting their own products vs merchants'
- streamlining the shopping vs trying to sell more stuff
As long as these fundamental conflicts aren't resolved, it's not going to improve.
The real amazon tax is getting people to think shipping fees are part of the item, and causing one $5 cable+shipping to be $10. Three $5 cables and shipping is $30. tbh if amazon went up in smoke like wildberries I would not even flinch.
My current strategy is to skip ads and skip any name that is just a jumble of letters. But the garbage producers are getting so good with AI they can create entire websites with US addresses and pictures of buildings and employees and none of it is real.
Would love a similar post breaking down the rightmove (UK equivalent of zillow) tax. Fortunately there is currently a court case against them that might help. I am also starting a #RightmoveHygiene campaign to encourage people to spend less time on there.
One could argue that Google Ads are jacking up the prices of hotels.
To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.
Sort by "Best Sellers" always on Amazon. "Featured" is driven by ads. Also? Firefox with Ublock Origin blocks ads (but it's an endless cat and mouse game).
Closed amazon account when Bz decided to get into politics. I realize I can buy everything I need “in the real world” and thru manufacture websites directly. I do not miss it.
I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead
Ads too, I guess
The only reason I have Prime these days is for the unlimited photo storage and then some extra storage for video. It’s hard to find a convenient and cost effective way to free my data.
I can recommend looking up Yanis Varoufakis and his Technofeudalism.
I don't understand the "theft" or "stealing" angle here, other than as a clumsy rhetorical device. I can see an "unfair" angle, and the behavior is definitely bad for customers, but it's not theft. Theft and stealing are when someone unlawfully[1] takes something that belongs to you. But here, it's never established that whatever was taken ever belonged to either the consumer or the maker in the first place.
[1] The author tries to escape this requirement by calling it "legal theft" but that's an oxymoron.
Amazon has no mercy, so neither do I.
In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...)
So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to bring it to my front door? I never got it.
And unfortunately for them... it keeps happening now?
Like every other package that gets delivered?!
(They always believe this, apparently... either that, or their agreement with their delivery insurance services must eat the cost).
I've more than gotten my muffler refunded now and they're none the wiser, so win win really!
They don't "always believe this", this will lead to your account being banned eventually, or at least barred from returning products.
Not true.
I've been a prime account member in good standing for over 5 years now.
I order thousands of dollars worth of stuff every year.
They're not cancelling my account. Ever.
They seriously don't give a shit. They're not paying these costs. It's all covered. They are not the same company who delivers or insures.
I certainly hope so. GP implies that they are committing fraud to "stick it to the man". Nine times out of ten, this simply results in the man sticking it to us again.
Amazon is not "the man".
They are for-profit corporation, not our government.
There's a difference.
The phrase "the man" means (roughly) "the establishment". The two biggest components of that are the government and big corporations.
I would be pretty surprised if Amazon insures their package delivery. Do you have a source for them using insurance?
Maybe when they use a 3rd party delivery service they can strongarm that service into eating the loss. But, where I am, Amazon is usually doing 1st party delivery.
(the reason I assume they don't is that a) they are big enough to eat any loss and b) losses happen at a pretty constant rate. So they would basically be paying an insurer $loss_amount * (1+insurer_margin) in premiums to immediately get payed back $loss_amount. not a great deal.)
Most likely they're sticking it to a delivery contractor. Amazon gets paid, you get your free stuff, and some working class stiff is peeing in a bottle driving a leased truck and not getting paid for their labor. Win win win, right?
You seriously believe the guy peeing in the bottle during deliveries is the one who eats the charge?
This isn't a restaurant and they're not waiters.
I bet they don't see a line-item deduction, but they're paid a lot less than they should be for their work.
What about Amazon's business and subcontracting practices makes you think they're willing to eat any operating expenses whatsoever?
I'm curious how similar/different this is to buying shelf space or aisle placement in physical stores.
Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases.
It's gone and confirmed and acknowledged by their support which made me take a screenshot of the popup where the card details are entered to confirm it. They in turned wanted to give me a 15€ gift card for the inconvenience and told them that I wasn't there asking for a gift card or discount and refused it.
So every single time you purchase with your credit card if you do not want your details to be saved, you have to MANUALLY go to your personal settings and remove the added card from your last purchase. Fucking amazing.
On top of that listings are overflowed with chinese brands and/or items that have no correlation to what I'm looking for.
Can someone suggest better alternatives here in Europe?
> The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.
"If you're not the customer, you're the product".
Well, Amazon actually did it. They made us the customer _AND_ the product. Hooray.
Like LOTS of other people, I, of course, use Amazon. But, more and more often... if I can find a product somewhere else within, say, 5-6%... I'll buy it that someplace else. Especially if that someplace else is actually a building I can walk into and inspect the thing I'm buying before I pay for it.
Shopping on Amazon is getting worse every day. How can it be good for Amazon in the long run that every time I buy something from their site, I actually have to spend time convincing myself that I'm not getting a knock-off product?
In the modern world, every single time money leaves my bank account I feel like I'm potentially being scammed. I hate it.
The solution could be common evolving public protocols to create large alternative non-profit marketplaces.
> non-profit marketplaces
So, um, Marxist utopias? Profit is exactly why all marketplaces exist.
You have to pay me to engage with Amazon.
They have become so big that they harm the buying power of the consumer and the selling power of the producer.
I know this first hand. Company had to give away 1-2 million in free engineering labor for the opportunity to obtain their business.
Have not bought anything from them in over 10 years and never will again.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. This is no different than grocery stores selling shelf space. It is not at all like theft (morally wrong) or taxes (infamously inefficient). And if you don't do it, you go out of business since you aren't competitive with someone that does. It's sad that such obvious rage bait makes it to the top of hacker news.
What do you mean? I don't see how Amazon would go out of business if they show the best match for the thing you just searched for higher than the ads.
I mean of course. It is a mom n pop store with just 3 trillion market cap. If they don't do 95 ads with 5 actual results, they'll be out of business by this weekend.
Huh, retail store has fixed amount of shelf space, it can't keep infinite variants, but Amazon has infinite real estate it can keep the exact item you search for on page 23 instead of page 1. Have same item appear 10 times on different pages/places in search, retail store can't do that.
It is like saying newspaper classified ads are same as Google ads. Not very good comparison.
At least they are labeled as “Sponsored”. There’s probably a browser extension to remove them.
This is why we must kill ads. Ads fund evil - be it Google, Amazon, you name it.
Has anyone found a useable fake review detector since Fakespot and Review Meta went down?
I'm sympathetic to the points he makes. But it's hard to take it seriously when he makes his money selling marketing and he's complaining about cpc advertising. It's like if a horse breeder were complaining about cars
Principal agent problem combined with a monopoly, what could go wrong?
In the end, we as a society value convenience more than global optima. So we will always land in some local optima. We deserve it.
Speak for yourself haha. Unconscious and unexamined behaviors hardly constitute a value system.
Unconscious values are still values.
I will just leave this here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
The word monopoly has lost all meaning online, it seems to just be synonymous now with 'successful business'.
You can cut Amazon out of your life tomorrow if you wanted. You could do it almost entirely with just Walmart.com if you wanted a dropin replacement.
If you only have one internet provider in your area, that's a monopoly, the cost of switching is essentially 'start an ISP'. Having to type in walmart.com does not make Amazon a monopoly.
I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
> And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else. In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
It’s very easy to blame systems and other people.
Sometimes the easy one to blame is also the right one to blame.
But I disagree though. Blaming human nature is much much easier. It means there is nothing we can do except give up and live with it.
In contrast, blaming the system means we can still change the system, and changing the system is extremely hard, especially when the rich and powerful have so much interest in keeping the system the way it is.
The system is made for humans, not laws of physics.
I think AWS still cares about customer trust, but Amazon retail abandoned that at least a decade ago. The ads are so high-margin compared to retail though (biggest profit center after AWS) that I don't expect them to change anything.
Amazon is more powerful than most countries.
This is generally true throughout history: powerful actors in strong countries are stronger than the most powerful actors in weak ones.
This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example.
What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.
One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.
I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.
I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.
It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned.
Amazon doesn't need to be so big and in so many industries. My pharmacy doesn't also need to be a movie studio. My cloud provider doesn't also need to be a self publishing business. It distorts too many things.
Yea, we really only need to enforce the laws and regulations on the books.
> What can we do about it? Not much.
You should do what I do: look for someplace else to buy from first. Amazon has "everything" - if you can find it. However there are usually small sellers of that niche (often niche.com) where they know something about the product and will direct your to the best one without adds. The smaller/weirder the niche the more likely this seller is to be helpful. You get to support "the little guy", and get a good product for a good price. Even if Amazon is cheaper, the smaller store is still the better value because you get a good product.
Usually I can purchase directly from the company that makes the product website.
Sometimes. Larger companies will not do that since it makes the places that sell most of their things mad to have to compete with the manufacture. (or sometimes they intentionally price such that others can undercut them).
Mostly I don't do this because I don't know which company makes the one I want. An independent third party that knows the product and sells several different versions from different companies can help me select which one is best for me. This is a valuable service - when you can find it.
I don’t give Amazon my money, that’s something most people have the agency to do. There are many, many other places to order from on the internet.
The ads make sense in capitalism. Without the described effect products would never change. Payment for ads ensures discovery works in adversarial free market.
The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.
I'm sorry, but how does a business writer lead an article with garbage like this:
Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue.
Is it revenue or profit? They are not the same thing.
Amazon’s decision making is beholden to growing its share price and the trite careerist ambitions of (8 reports per manager) ^ (5 layers of management) = ~32768 middle managers. It’s destined to become a cesspool for consumers. The only question is whether there will be any other options left by the time most people realize.
No wonder Amazon sued Perplexity to forbid agents on their site, agents could cut through the crap and find what users wanted instead of what Amazon peddles. They even won the suit.
I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.
Regulation, antitrust, regulation, antitrust.
A) More laws to solve more problems the government has never been able to solve.
OR
B) Don't use Amazon
LOL
A) The old "laws don't work perfectly so we're better off without any laws" argument.
Not using Amazon (in light of geopolitical events and quite frankly, just not liking the way they do business or Jeff Bezos (as he presents himself to the world)) has been a net positive.
There was a time it was good and convenient and the worst of what they are wasn't quite so obvious but that time has passed.
Insinuating that there is one "best product" that Amazon magically knows is the best is quite an assumption. The best product might be completely different for different people and different depending on the time for the same person. Plus there are always new products being introduced and products being discontinued. I think we are mis assuming ill intent a little. Second issue is the assumption that there is always a fixed pie of demand for a product, when a new great product comes out more people will purchase from a category, its never fixed completely. This sounds like cope for book sales being lower than expected if we are being honest.
I'm honestly at the stage where I'm finding the same product but cheaper in the local retailer. I don't mean a dollar here or there, I mean a full 30% cheaper. Particularly most things food related. I used to be putting in an order weekly, I now haven't in almost three months.
IIRC this was talked about in Cory Doctorow's Enshittification book. Here's my bookmarklet to get rid of sponsored results, it's survived a couple years:
Maybe instead of being an author your should have had the foresight to be Jeff Bezos.
Grocery stores and department stores have played games with what items they stock and where they stock it (location on the shelf is hugely important in a grocery store) for decades, it's just better hidden than the 'sponsored' text next to Amazon paid ads. It's infinitely easier to make a product and get it available on Amazon.com than it ever was to get your product into a grocery store.
>They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
As others have pointed out, without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.
> without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.
If you are Amazon, this is essentially just the multi-armed bandit problem, at it is not particularly difficult. You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it.
>You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it.
You just handwaved away the hardest problem. What is 'enough'? What if the first user failed to plug it in and left a 1/5? Or liked it but left a 3/5 anyways? And what if you show it too many people so now rebranding products and just dropshipping them takes off?
Maybe we need ad blockers for Amazon ads.
The market will fix this right? RIGHT?
Prime is a waste of money. I find most stuff arrives in 2-3 days and its easy to spend the minimum to get free shipping.
I feel at least in major urban areas Amazon’s delivery network is efficient enough that they have to artificially delay non-Prime orders. I order from Amazon only occasionally, and while sometimes there’s actual step-by-step tracking I’ll usually see no movement at all for 3+ days, and suddenly the item has dispatched from the warehouse and it is reaching my house in an hour.
I've learned that I don't need anything in 2-3 days typically anyway.
Last week I searched for a "Eufy S350" security camera on Amazon. Instead of search results, Alexa for Shopping took over the entire screen, proceeded to tell me that the Eufy S350 doesn't exist, and then recommended a Eufy vacuum cleaner.
This feels comical to me today, but I can imagine a near future where paid AI ads gaslit you into believing that the product you searched for is vastly inferior to the product AI "recommends".
Long time Amazon seller/brand here (and ex-academic/game theorist) -- it's a little more complicated if you think about the various parties' incentives, but yeah we have a half-assed market equilibrium that sucks for everyone.
Amazon as the marketplace facilitator has an interesting job to run:
1) It wants customers to get exactly what they want (as measured by the minimal amount of clicking/scrolling/time it takes for a customer to hit the landing page -> complete shopping). This is mostly customer-centric.
2) It wants to promote as much competition as it can between products and brands so that no seller dominates the market. This is... mildly customer-centric so big sellers can't rest on their laurels, and mostly self-serving (so no single seller/brand can gain enough power to threaten Amazon).
3) Amazon has to strike a balance of #1 and #2 so that there's some opportunity for new entrants to enter any product space. Back in the days they structured search so that some percentage of results would be new sellers and products, and new products would get some amount of sessions to prove they convert within a certain statistical distribution to land a certain rank (BSR). Note the rise of alphabet soup Amazon brands is partially because they allowed for disposable brands that could be black-hatted, and partially because for a few years these sellers were just generating tons of new brands to share new SKU real estate on search results (so when you searched for "small kitchen colander" or what not, you'd find the same product being sold by 10 sockpuppet sellers occupying 10 search spaces, taking result space away from the other sellers).
But what if they can get everyone to partially pay for #3? Enter ads, where basically new and old brands pay to play for eyeballs on Amazon.
So if you think about it, Amazon is a search problem where you wanna push results such that the expected value of the results pushed yield the highest expected value, something along the lines of: Expected Value (EV) of your product = [your sales price] x [your product's conversion rate in the past X days] x [some confidence level of said conversion rate] - [returns] + [whatever other Amz secret sauce] + [Amazon PPC]
Amazon can get people to pay for their eyeballs, swap some seller blackhat tactics for others, and more or less keep OK results. So that's Amazon's end.
As an established seller -- I know my product converts at X%, so as long as the math works out where I spend $Y/click, expect it to convert at X%, and my profit Z > Y * X it's what I do (and the tax I pay), and I move that up and down depending on my inventory situation. If possible, yes, I would pass some of that down to price raises as long as the market's willing to bear it, so I can make a minimum margin requirement off my Amazon channel (which is the lowest, compared to my D2C website or through offline B&M channels, but I do so because my biggest volume is on-Amazon).
As a customer... yeah the default search results are "good enough" for the 80-20 crowd; the convenience, ease-to-checkout, and 1-2 day shipping wins them over. As a "nerdy" customer who likes researching products to get the best one, I used to research via online reviews and reddit (most of which are gamified in their own ways)... but now I use AI (ChatGPT, *not* Amazon's Alexa Shopping because it's not great) and mostly call it a day.
This seems generally like the US corporate playbook. Create a product, monopolize it and milk the monopoly. SpaceX, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, Facebook, Google…
Whats going to be hilarious is if brick and mortar companies become popular again because of the painful U.I., scammy companies, and broken search of Amazon.
That's just not going to happen. You have to go out in the rain or heat, pay for parking, maybe not find what you want, pay 30% more than online, so online still has advantages.
What baffles me is that e-commerce sites all tend to get worse with time. The moment a site I like turns into a marketplace, I know it will only go downhill.
Must be some MBA thing. Must maximise revenue in every possible way. I have still no idea why the local white goods (and everything else) seller decided it was smart idea to pollute their own product search by becoming marketplace. I am going to you because well you are not that horrible and actually have store near me.
Enshittification for everyone that comes into contact with a corporation run with only profit (and profit growth) in mind.
One would be tempted to think that doing things different and actually providing a good service for consumers, sellers, etc would be a multibillion dollar business, but somehow it seems like it isn't.
I like the stock
Ads are tax on the market, that costs everyone and wastes most of it.
Ad industry is an example that markets don't correctly solve everything.
> When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options.
Sure, this is probably accurate in many situations.
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far [for Seth Godin's new book, The Knot] is the search "Seth Godin The Knot".
But not that one. If you cut spending on that ad to zero, you would lose an immeasurably small number of sales. The ad is high yield because people who search for "Seth Godin The Knot" are already planning to buy Seth Godin's The Knot. Letting other people display ads on top of that search won't dissuade them.
Turns out we ended up with paid search, but paid for by who? :D
Seems bad.
Large enough companies always set up rent mechanisms.
> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.
The stealing is, of course, much more fundamental than the search tax.
I am reminded of the saying by 19th-century French social thinker Proudhon, who said: "La propriete? C'est le vol!" ("Property? Why, that's theft!") - he was describing interactions which, at that time, it was conceivably possible to manage collectively for the public benefit - taken over by individuals, institutions and mechanisms economically benefits a small few to the detriment of the majority (farmers and laborers). The Amazon product search example is different, but then, also not so different. I mean, it's just search - and the blog post author knows it could just be implemented reasonably so that people who want to find his book find his book. Then suddenly, Amazon put a fence around that field and demands you pay a part of your annual yield for it to allow you to farm that field, and not drive you off by force. And that metaphor is probably quite clear to you even though there are no farmers, fields or fences in the blog post.
Amazon's not stealing that money from its stockholders, which is who
See also: ads for apps in app stores.
These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
It's completely insane to me that the first search for Okta in the app store isn't the actual Okta app, it's a half-page ad for something that could easily be confused with the Okta app
substitute for literally any business name
Sure, I know the right one to click on, if I'm in a sound state of mind. What if I'm sleepy? Stressed? 65+ years old?
Apple should really be ashamed of itself. But alas, corporations don't have shame, Steve would have been ashamed though.
App Store is a wasteland, I don't think there are more than 100 good apps in millions. All want in-app-purchase, none is fair to give me an upfront price. I don't want for example my kids being bugged to buy apps that cost $100/week.
The amazon tax holds nothing to the credit card tax. Credit cards have been driving prices up for decades with their behind the scenes fees that are passed onto the customer. All for "convenience" of the right to buy something because now they have created a near mandatory purchasing system duopoly.
Bravo!
If you know the exact product you want, Amazon is great.
If you don't, it's absolutely horrible.
Is this different than the decades-only practice of grocery stores auctioning off all the eye-level shelf space to brands willing to pay for it?
Google has entered the chat, and also eBay and every aggregator site on the web.
> It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks.
This assertion lacks evidence. An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself. The ad will earn you a click-through to the product, but buyers will begin to back out instead of following through with a purchase. Ad purchases cannot overcome insufficient revenue - it won't be profitable long-term.
Yes, Amazon has a problem with vendors buying good reviews as well. It doesn't overcome a high number of poor reviews, or a high number of returns.
> And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.
Reeks of a conspiracy theory. Most customers simply don't have the time or energy to research any more than the top handful of results. Only a rare person goes 10 pages deep into the search results. Organic search results will produce less traffic when people don't even look at them. But that's not evidence in and of itself that the organic search results were nerfed in some way.
I hate to remind people of the basic truth about modern Amazon, but here goes: the vast majority of the inventory is made in China and the exact same product can be found at a tiny, tiny fraction of the Amazon price on AliExpress and similar sites. The value that Amazon adds is their logistic network that can deliver to domestic US addresses in a day or two, compared to weeks. The difference in price between Amazon and AliExpress justifies sellers spending enormous sums on ads and review purchases, because even if they do sell garbage on Amazon, enough people bought it at such ridiculous margins that the seller can tear down the product with the bad reviews and high return rate and re-offer it under a new brand with the same ad and review purchase strategy and still make a profit. But the person to blame for that is not Amazon, and it's not the seller, it's the fool who decides to pay the ridiculous price compared to the AliExpress price.
Books are one of the categories where they aren't printed in China, they're not sold on AliExpress, and searching for "seth godin the knot" returns the actual correct listing as the first organic search result. So I'm not sure why the author brings his book up as evidence. He might do better by reminding his publisher that "selling on Amazon" is not a homogenous experience and they ought to reconsider flushing money down the drain on advertisements they don't need.
> An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself.
Yeah but at the time when I buy it it's gonna have thousands of 5 star reviews, and the images themselves will be the shiniest most beautiful garbage ever seen by mankind.
Amazon has the most useless search I know. Also, idk who clicks those 'Sponsored' results, but for me they are an automatic pass. But then again Amazon is such a scumbag company that uses its own brands as a weapon to make sellers pay to be visible.
cancelled our Prime membership a year ago (after nearly 10 years) and went from buying most non-food things on Amazon to occasionally buying small random items. We broke our addiction to 1 or 2-day shipping, and we're just fine.
It's gotten ridiculous in the last month with behavior I've never seen before. If I want to buy a specific book I type <author name> <title> into the search bar. The search bar even helps me complete the entry, and then a page shows with a choice of several books with my chosen book at the top.
Fine. Except now after one second, the whole page changes and then there's only one book on the page and it has nothing to do with the book I actually searched for.
So obviously they know about the book I want because they just showed it to me but then they make it disappear in favor of one I don't want but which I presume is one the publisher paid them to show me.
My workaround is to search on Amazon in a private tab so they don't know who I am. In that case the book I want shows up and I can click on it and get its URL and then paste it into the original Amazon window where I'm already logged in, and I can order it. Except I don't, because I'm so disgusted by this I go directly to the publisher's website and order it there.
This is ridiculous.
Amazon is throwing money on the floor with this behavior and they're probably just begging for a restraint of trade class-action lawsuit.
> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.
People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
You're completely ignoring the fact that the majority of people do not expect a search result ranking to be influenced by bidding. Yes it happens, but unless the item is labeled as an ad, most people will infer value that does not exist. And this is wrong. The only reason they appear in the search is so that they do not look like ads. There's plenty of places to advertise and the best for the consumer is for transparency to exist in the first place.
The problem TFA is complaining about isn't ads in general, but specifically ads in Amazon search results for products sold on Amazon.
Amazon is a two-sided marketplace. Why should their obligation in search be 100% to one side?
Even for the buyer, there are second order consequences if you remove the ability for sellers to effectively sell. If sellers can't effectively ramp, they're going to turn to other platforms. If new sellers can't compete on Amazon, prices will increase and diversity of options will go down.
I'm not saying ads in search are a hard necessity in every platform. I'm just asking people to think through the whole issue before making snap judgments because ads are annoying to them.
You take the money you would've spent on ads and instead offer a lower price than the current leader to make up for the buyer's uncertainty toward your product. This lets a search algorithm organically decide that you are among the top (risk-neutral) value contenders. Once that uncertainty disappears, you will have a higher value product and can therefore command a higher price.
Put another way, the buyer uncertainty about your product actually, concretely makes your product worse. They don't know whether your thing will fail. The don't know whether you will go out of business if they need support. All else equal, either your product is not the best product, or you need to offer a lower price. Ads are a way to instead just pay someone to straight up lie (i.e. defraud) and say it's recommended when it's not.
It's a nice idea and I can see it working in some cases.
I'll be the first to admit I don't know the specifics, but I imagine in some cases, it's economically prohibitive to lower the price by such an amount that it makes up for the uncertainty in a typical search algorithm.
Then your product is actually worse for the customer. It's nice that you want it to be better, but it's not in a meaningful way that you can't just handwave away. Risk carries a cost.
Another possibility would be for the marketplace to be better able to load information about your product so you could provide some more information and reduce that uncertainty. E.g. that you use different (better) materials in your construction. Or you could work with the marketplace to purchase or demonstrate some kind of insurance policy to mitigate support concerns. Basically allow those unknown pieces of information to be discoverable by search engines and the customer. If the market has more knowledge, then if you have a better product, it should organically rank better. Either way, ads do literally nothing to benefit the buyer since they provide zero information (actually they provide a negative piece of information: someone paid for you to see something, so you can assume it's not in your interest to see it).
The article isn't an attack on advertising to bring awareness of your product to an unaware market; it's an attack on being made to pay for a customer who has specifically asked for your product to be shown your product.
Unless your _ads_ are going to compete with your competitors' then that's not going to be effective. Ironically middlemen are probably solution here, you'd be better off going to trade shows and working with department stores that sell air fryers, they'll want to turn your lower cost into their higher margin.
> People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
This is a lazy strawman and not what the author of the post argued for.
> It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
Then maybe contribute to the dialog on that front. The article did so more than your comment setting up a strawman.
I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."
You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.
If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.
I have to agree with OP, this phrase specifically reveals it isn't a good take:
> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place
Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.
So advertising entitles you to sales?
Of course not. A terrible product may not sell well even if it has great ads, for instance.
> advertise everywhere you want
Except, apparently, the surface that's actually closest to the purchasing decision? Why must that surface be forbidden?
The case is laid out pretty clearly in the article. Spend some time thinking about it.
right, you've spent most of your capital on product, and now you're competing with everyone else on $/ad.
Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.
Say you invent a crap product, and shove ads under my nose to bug me while I want to buy a decent product. Why should I accept that?
Just get your products reviewed by trusted reviewers, if you can budge them maybe you deserve a bit of attention from us. Someone who has a stake in being trusted for their fair reviews.
Ads are a scourge.
Can't you just use it at home like a normal person?
The problem is we aren’t in a world of more “reasonable” advertising. What we see deployed now are basically weapons-grade manipulation systems, and upstarts do not have equal access to the arsenal. So yeah, they need to get the word out, but they can’t even do that! The big dogs get better, more privileged access.
you sound like the kind of person who believes the best air fryer is the one that is advertised the most.
No, but I'd say it's slightly more likely than by chance (after all, success begets capital).
I actually prefer Dr. Pepper, but a lot of people think Coke makes the best cola, Apple makes the best laptops, etc.
Should Dr Pepper have to spend a dollar per purchase to be the top result when you search for "Dr Pepper"? Is it good for the customer that when they search Dr Pepper and they stopped paying for the placement ads the first page is no longer Dr Pepper but instead "UUBUOI SODA 100% SODA COLA POP PEPPER 7 UP〖1L〗〖2L〗〖12OZ〗〖500ML〗" AND "FUUOYAY YUM YUM SPARKLE FIZZ 致癌神水"
While this isn't necessarily the reality for sodas, this is the reality for darn near every thing I look to buy off Amazon.
Soda is actually not a bad example to disprove your hypothesis. It's just one example of where your own health and finances will be better off if you ignore advertisers entirely.
and exclusively paying attention to what doctors say:
https://www.health.com/what-happens-when-you-stop-drinking-s...
Counterpoint: Amazon among the most favorable institutions in the US
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP...
38% of people also think opposing fascism is very unfavourable according to that. Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
> Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
You’re talking about Amazon’s actual customers here. Is Amazon supposed to ignore the opinion of their customers for the opinion of some commenter on HN?
Is this not the direct result of consumers being too lazy to price match and price discover? Amazon still has the ability to sort price: low to high. You also still have the ability to ask your friends and family what air fryer they purchased. If the average consumer just implicitly trusts Amazon such that they buy whatever shows up first, that’s not Amazon’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault.
I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.
Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
As much as I'd like to agree with the article's point and am critical of Amazon etc etc, you lost me here. $35k cash bonus for every employee does not pass the smell test. I'm sure the delivery driver who famously needs to pee into a bottle because they can't afford a toilet break would love such a bonus, but they don't get one.
This makes me doubt everything in the article. Which is really a shame because such articles are necessary. But you need to keep your facts straight, otherwise you are completely disqualifying yourself from any serious discourse. At least for me.
There is enough to criticise with Amazon. Just keep to the things that are true.
The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions. They're employees of contract companies that put the Amazon logo on their vans.
But that aside, what part do you disagree so strongly with?
52 weeks * $1B weekly advertising profit / 1.5M employees = ~$35000
I don't know how he's determining profit, but quarterly advertising revenue is ~$20B and margins are presumably very high.
> The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions.
Of course hair splitting can make things "technically true" but that doesn't make this any more suitable to a serious debate in which the other side is playing dirty and the main argument against that is that dirty is bad. That argument loses its sting if itself embedded in dirt.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. As far as I can tell his estimate is reasonable.
He's not saying they get the $35K bonus.
Fair, but how easy is it to in that case mistakenly read it like that?
It's not the only questionable figure in Seth's post. He also drops an ad for his new book within 2.5 short paragraphs. While criticising ad practices.
He writes "if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place". Who is entitled to ...what exactly? Maybe you could argue the best air frier should get the top search result spot. Already calling that "entitled" is a stretch though, let alone being entitled to a sale.
He writes "Who ends up paying the more than $50 billion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sellers. Sellers can’t make heartfelt donations for long. It’s you." It's economics 101 that such overhead, just like taxes, is ultimately split between buyer and seller. Profits go down and paid prices go up. Seth surely knows this (if not then he should not be blogging about economics) but chooses to give you the simplified version to push a narrative. Which is sad. Again, there is enough to legitimately criticise.
I don't want to keep listing more of this, but it's really not feeling particularly honest discourse if you bend things while claiming a moral highground. Cause that makes you lose it.
Unless your goal as an author is just to fuel outrage, no matter cost. Sure, an option, but not part of a serious debate then. Which, again, is a shame.
> Fair, but how easy is it to in that case mistakenly read it like that?
I had no trouble parsing it, but then again, I'm used to people whining about how they're getting screwed because their employer made so $1M/employee but they're not getting paid $1M.
Otherwise - yeah, I was not impressed with the article. Ads are acting just like ads always have. There is nothing special he could point out about Amazon's ads.