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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 :)
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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'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!
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.
> 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).
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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..
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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'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.
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.
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'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.
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
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?
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.
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".
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This seems generally like the US corporate playbook. Create a product, monopolize it and milk the monopoly. SpaceX, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, Facebook, Google…
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
"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.
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.
>>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.
Enjoy your steak, Mr Reagan.
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.
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?
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 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.
I've seen a lot of "Thai Food Near Me" as the name of restaurants.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”
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 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'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.)
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.
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.
But Etsy also has these ads, and I find them even harder to identify than on Amazon
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Etsy is full of AI and temu aliexpress slop; how do you avoid it?
did that already years ago :)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, those moms and pops are ripping us off, living like… well, not like Bezos.
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.
I cancelled prime this year. It no longer had any value. It's more expensive but shittier in every way.
And with adverts!
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.
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.
> 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 :)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Amazon's logistics are a cut above, both in terms of turnaround time and their drivers actually knowing how to deliver to my house.
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.
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
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).
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!
And you can buy a position on the best seller list for your product.
Results do seem better.. What in this instance, does "Best Sellers" mean?
of course, the best seller is usually whoever has spent the most on advertising
"Featured", ha ha. Should rename to "Paid For by Ads".
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.
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.
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.
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!)
[delayed]
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.
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.
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'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!
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
> 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
"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.
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.
Regulation, antitrust, regulation, antitrust.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think Ad's may be the best and most profitable part of Amazon.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/marketplaces-airbnb-future-foun...
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..
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
> 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.
If you know the exact product you want, Amazon is great.
If you don't, it's absolutely horrible.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
The solution could be common evolving public protocols to create large alternative non-profit marketplaces.
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.
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...
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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
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.
Always best to search across Amazon, Ebay and Walmart. Vendors sell the same stuff across all three channels.
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.
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.
I can recommend looking up Yanis Varoufakis and his Technofeudalism.
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'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.
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
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.
At least they are labeled as “Sponsored”. There’s probably a browser extension to remove them.
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.
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".
> 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.
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?
Has anyone found a useable fake review detector since Fakespot and Review Meta went down?
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?
The market will fix this right? 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?
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.
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.
Maybe we need ad blockers for Amazon ads.
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.
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.
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.
This seems generally like the US corporate playbook. Create a product, monopolize it and milk the monopoly. SpaceX, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, Facebook, Google…
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.