Bezos famously says Amazon's "secret sauce" is "obsessive compulsive focus on the customer." Isn't this move at odds with that focus? Customers don't want to see ads.
So is not dealing with commingling. Amazon's focus is on driving down costs, and finding every way to leverage existing position for additional revenue. The claim of customer focus is true only to the extent of finding and greasing every possible route between the customer’s wallet and Amazon's bottom line. Anything else is (as one should expect of any executive’s public statements) simply PR.
The customer loses valuable information and decision power with commingling, especially important in these bazaar-type situations.
There are plenty of vendors selling to Amazon that aren't the brand owner. Look up Apple vs Mobile Star, they sued a company that was selling (allegedly) fake products to Amazon as a vendor that showed up as "sold by Amazon", nothing to do with commingling.
And the fraction of customers that care about choosing which seller to buy from is low, compared to those who care about price and speed of shipping.
Amazon turns off commingling on high risk products, fwiw.
Internally at Amazon, the definition of customer depends on the team. For 3rd party seller team seller is a customer. And so for the advertisement team, advertisers are customer. When they say customer obsession this is what is meant.
In times of conflict though (e.g., marketplace team and Single Detail Page team when it comes to amount of data to be loaded Vs page latency) the decision is usually made in favour of Customer, i.e., buyer.
edit: Bah to a certain extent you're right, plenty of tech is before its time and me saying being at the right place at the right time is a hind-sight 20-20 sort of comment. What I'm trying to say is I think lots of people have the same vision. Some people have it too early, some have it too late, and some have it at the time where the stars align: customers get it, VC gets it, and your company gets and and has the ability to execute on it.
long story short I hope we can agree that while the ability to execute is a requirement it simply isn't enough.
I feel like this used to be true, but hasn't been the case for at least the past year
Amazon just seems to enjoy screwing with anyone who doesn't have Prime, and has done it for years. It's never gotten a lot of coverage because of the pervasiveness of Prime: Anyone reading this comment probably never knew this, because they already had Prime.
The biggest benefit so far? I am generally ordering less stuff overall. I felt like I had to order x amount of stuff to make my prime membership "worth it", but it was never "worth it". It just resulted in me spending more money with Amazon, even if I had better alternatives around me.
Yeah because WalMart is just a bastion of ethics. Why not support local businesses? I guess you have to ask what you goal is in quitting Amazon - if it's "sticking it to the man", buying stuff from WalMart is probably even worse, ethically.
But that's not what anyone means by local.
It has nothing to do with sticking it to anyone. Amazon doesn't have the same value proposition as it once did. I realized I was using it just to use it, among other reasons.
And I also use a fair bit of Walmart and Best Buy ordering now. Both do ship to store as well, though Walmart's is annoyingly lackluster because in-store pickup closes early in the day.
In addition Amazon has become why I stopped shopping at eBay. Unreliable products from China or outright fakes. Ironically I go to eBay now when I want some genuine tool or part as I can get it used from a US liquidator. Combine that with that I don't really care about Prime videos or "Prime exclusive offers" (which are really fake discounted Chinese goods for the most part)
That's the thing - you're not an Amazon customer if you don't subscribe to Prime. You're the merchant's customer, you just happen to be shopping through Amazon's site.
You're the affiliate sites customer. You're the vendors customer. You're the VISA/Mastercard's customer. You're the gateway/merchant account providers customer.
People need to learn to accept that you simply aren't Amazon's customer unless you buy direct from them, in very much the same way you aren't eBay's customer.
Second: Using their store makes you their customer. If I go into a store and buy a product, giving them my credit card number to purchase merchandise they advertised, that store can't claim that I'm not really their customer, that they're just a distribution platform for the manufacturer, and that they're not responsible for the counterfeit they just sold me.
Second: The courts strongly disagree with you. You are drawing a thin line between marketplace and vendor. As far as the courts are concerned, they are not the same thing, and you absolutely do not have the exact same protections you would in purchasing directly.
No, he's probably still the customer. Amazon still sells things itself (that's what "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com" means). Amazon Marketplace is just part or Amazon.com.
My last two orders (over a year ago at this point) took 9 and 11 days to get to me. These were two-day ground shipments, and the products were in stock and fulfilled by Amazon. They simply let them sit for a week, and then shipped the slowest method possible.
This is obviously a ploy for me to sign up for Prime. I'll simply shop elsewhere. Amazon's prices are basically retail at this point, anyways. They used to have lots of deals, but I rarely see that on items I shop for these days.
Thank you, advertisers, for paying for Gmail and all those good products.
Are you not convinced that Google Search, DDG, Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat are all "good" products in the eye of many people? As far as I can tell, all of those products are paid for by sponsors.
Indeed, networks effects may sometimes be relevant to some of these tools. But that's certainly not always true.
Disney does not expect someone to see an ad for Disney World and immediately win a click-through conversion for a $2k vacation. They do expect to remain relevant, and the ads have "worked" when Disney pops into mind when I try to plan my next vacation. So they make sure to continue to advertise to families.
I do not want to see those ads.
Having run CPC campaigns many times, companies do care about conversion rates. However, you are tracked across multiple sites and days. But companies do want to know who converted after seeing the ad and who converted after clicking the ad.
So, you're right they might not care that you convert immediately. But they do care that people convert over time or they'll pull the ad.
In a perfect market, the consumer and seller know everything about each other and every other product and service that they could conceivably ever want.
Since we live with imperfect markets, consumers do not have all the information about everything on the market. Sellers will pay money to communicate to consumers about their brand, product, service, etc. A percentage of consumers will be aware of this seller the next time they research or consider making a purchase decision.
The perfect ad is only shown the consumers that it is relevant to. Search/display ads are still not perfect, but they're closer to this than previous mediums of communication.
many ads "work", and even in a perfect world where I only see the ads that "work" for me, that doesn't mean I want to see them.
However, this is obviously false in many respects.
Customers want to get on with their day in general. Looking at ads, relevant or not, isn't their end goal.
Depends who you mean by "customers". Customers will be advertisers, and you bet they'll obsess over making a great product for them.
This strange assumption keeps perpetuated at HN as if it was the only possible opinion - but it's far from it. Personally, most of the ads I see on the internet are next versions of my favourite products, their next versions and related offerings, and I generally enjoy them and seldom click through to actually purchase something. And from talking to a lot of non-tech people, I actually tend to think that there's a lot more of people with similar experience that are just very silent in the whole ad debate.
So in a detail page you'll see "Frequently bought together" (not paid placement), "Sponsored products related to this item" (paid), "Customers who bought this item also bought" (not paid).
Whether or not you think it's an ad is up to you... they're all trying to get you to buy more. :-)
They still do stupid shit. See the joke that was AIV on Android for years.