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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.
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.
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...
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.
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 is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
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.
"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.
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.)
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
There are still lots of good reasons to shop local, but I’m not sure speed is the best reason.
Oh yea. Getting downvoted for saying the truth. So modern Hackernews
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.
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.
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.
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.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
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.
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!
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.
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.
Am I getting old? I feel like a dinosaur still Googling things.
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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…
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.
To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...
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.
No reason to get congress involved when you can have the president suspend duty-free de minimus with executive authority.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
This needs to be pinned as the top comment. Thank you!
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..
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is it.
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.
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.
"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.
The incumbent has a massive advantage, making it harder for a new (but better) product to get on the first page.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP...
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?
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)
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.
It is like saying newspaper classified ads are same as Google ads. Not very good comparison.
>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.
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 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?
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'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.
They are for-profit corporation, not our government.
There's a difference.
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.)
This isn't a restaurant and they're not waiters.
Ads too, I guess
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
It’s very easy to blame systems and other people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Except, apparently, the surface that's actually closest to the purchasing decision? Why must that surface be forbidden?
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.
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.
I actually prefer Dr. Pepper, but a lot of people think Coke makes the best cola, Apple makes the best laptops, etc.
While this isn't necessarily the reality for sodas, this is the reality for darn near every thing I look to buy off Amazon.
I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.