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Comment by blairanderson | Hacker News Reader

Our data shows "Amazon Choice" is essentially a join table between product and search keywords, ordered by a multiplier of conversions, ratings, and availability.

- Customers are happy when they get stuff fast - it needs to be available right now, and in the buy box

- Higher rated items are theoretically better than lower rated items

- "choice" badge is keyword specific: a plant light could be choice for "grow light bulb" and "grow light led" but not for "light bulb".

Our data shows the items are not correlated by margins for. We often see negative NET PPM on "choice" items.

Source: I run an Amazon consultancy that manages roughly $30M/year sold through Amazon.

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So this would largely imply that Amazon's Choice truly is about giving customers the best experience (to the extent possible given the quality of keyword and review data)?

Basically, labeling products the customer is most likely to purchase.

but, pessimistically or realistically, I expect they are also training customers to blindly trust the black box and eventually the criteria will change towards maximizing short-term value.

Don’t see why that’s a bad thing, the less time I spend browsing amazon and reading reviews to find a suitable product the better. As long as people are consistently happy with the things they get they only have reason to rejoice.

Could I get something cheaper if I spend time looking for it? Maybe, but the time I spend looking is also money down the drain, for what usually amounts to savings of a couple dollars and cents. Rarely worth it.

I see two problems. First, the Amazon rating system is untrustworthy. There is simply far too much counterfeit reviewing and far too little done about it. This is a systemic problem that just needs to be fixed for the platform as a whole.

The more nuanced problem, I think, is the fact that it can create a feedback loop. Something can be popular simply because it's cheap, but "Amazon's Choice" implies quality, which makes people think they're getting a deal because it's also cheap. What sprung to mind for me was LockpickingLawyer's[1] series on Amazon's Choice for things like "padlock", lock, and safe, all of which were of fairly low quality, or at least lower quality than "Amazon's Choice" would suggest.

The problem is that, most of the time, people aren't going to know that what they have is low quality because it will almost never get tested and most people don't know anything about lock security. So they trust Amazon to tell them, when really it's the blind leading the blind

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ

[2]: https://youtu.be/kJ1_P5oqf6Y

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I think padlocks is a bad example.

The "quality" of a padlock genuinely does not matter. You should know this if you watch LPL! An experienced picker can get into any lock. And a determined but less dexterous enemy can trivially cut any lock you paid less that $100 for. And even then it won't take someone with the right tool more than a minute or two to cut through any padlock.

It's the same way with bike locks, or really any lock. They are a deterrent against the unwashed masses, but they never actually stop a determined actor.

they never actually stop a determined actor.

And that is never actually the point. Most theft is not personally targeted. Sure there are the times that someone cuts a hole through a storage unit into a neighboring unit they know has expensive stuff, but mostly it's opportunistic. If you have a weaker lock, you have greater risk. Especially if your lock is so weak that it is trivial to make it look like it wasn't broken until you try to open it.

This happened to me once. I bought my lock from the storage company, but someone broke and then visibly reassembled the lock. Lost all the early prototypes from my startup, plus thousands in replaceable equipment.

> If you have a weaker lock, you have greater risk.

I think this is only true in limited circumstances. Someone went to the storage facility with the intention of stealing, and had the opportunity to window shop for the weakest looking lock.

Yes, also in my experience "Amazon's Choice" does not protect you from counterfeit, grey market or any other crap items.

I wrote to jeff (at) amazon (dot) com last week about this, because I got super upset. And some middle manager replied. I shipped US -> UK some underwear from a company that uses no latex (I'm allergic), sends items inside a ziplocked sealed bag and prohibits underwear returns (for hygiene reasons).

After waiting for the parcel for 2 days at home, as I was in a hurry to get more latex free underwear, I got an Amazon envelope and the underwear came inside without any packaging and clearly used (!). I was furious.

Not an isolated event. A few weeks ago, I ordered a shower with a chlorine filter from Amazon UK. I know this korean brand very well. Again, I got the item without any original packaging, and water inside (!).

So I don't trust Amazon anymore for items that are more than $10. People abuse the return policy, and Amazon does not care. Or it's even their business model: Ship it again, selling it as new. Online shopping is getting very tricky.

I'd gladly pay more at places that guarantee brand new items. Things are getting really scammy. Around 1/5 of the items I buy online have been opened and used, or have some defects. And I'm talking about expensive stuff and supposedly reputable sellers.

The jeff@ experience is really poor now. There doesn't seem to be a way to request real review by someone who might care about something other than ticket throughput. I tried it when I got a ding against my account because my wife and I had ordered something that in total was over a limit. I was accused of misuse of accounts. Ended up move all my personal data out of Amazon because of it.

It's been bad for years. I've heard from people who have gotten emails back that said that Amazon is actively pursuing a partnership with a company that they have never contacted (mine). Other people say they just get boilerplate responses that seem to be written by bad AI or non-native speakers who didn't understand the customer email.

That’s nasty. They do point out in the article at least two examples where knockoff fashion items were badges instead of the real deal, so it seems somewhat pervasive.

Yes, I think their warehouse policies are totally crazy.

But that has a little advantage. When they send you used items, it is easy to notice.

If you buy at some reputable shops, they know how to scam you and resell used items as brand new, not as refurbished, grade A or whatever, which is illegal at least in EU.

For example, I wrote to the customer service of a famous fountain pen shop in the UK asking about return policies on a very particular model which comes sealed with stickers. I was shocked when they said I could not only open the box and inspect the pen, but also ink it and use it. If after a week I decide I no longer like it, I should just send it back. It will get sold as brand new. They only advised me to open the stickers really carefully to facilitate their (scam) task.

In fact, if you shop around their website, you'd notice there are practically no refurbished or open box items in proportion to their high volume of sales.

If you ask any fountain pen enthusiast, a pen that has been used for a week is not new. Just like a car that has 2000 km in the dial. Good shops even sell models have been dipped in ink, not even filled, at a heavy discount.

As a fountain pen enthusiast, do you mind naming the shop in question?

Cult Pens. The problem is that most manufacturers collaborate by not plastic wrapping and sealing pens.

For example, no Pilot is sealed except the 823. I don't think any brands other than MB, TWSBI and Dupont make it obvious to notice if a pen has been opened.

Same with good mechanical keyboards. E.g. all Leopolds are sent to EU and US retailers without stickers.

If they were stupid enough to put that in in an email, forwarding to Trading Standards might get them leaned on. Though I admit these days it's a long shot.

Trading Standards used to be really great about responding to these sorts of complaints, and for larger sites and retailers they'd have their own test shopping as well. Tory austerity means they haven't had budget for years so are almost completely toothless. Only when Brexit stops being the only issue driving UK politics will the systemic destruction of the successful parts of the UK ever get noticed again.

Properly labeled knockoffs are fine in my book. Or at least a far smaller issue.

Recently bought a name-brand tool for ~100 € on Amazon and it was (1) used (2) counterfeit.

Looks like there is an inflection point where adversarial activities become more profitable than genuine activity. I wonder if this has happened for Amazon. In this case, I would expect counterfeiters would grow exponentially. That's just the laws of economics.

> Around 1/5 of the items I buy online have been opened and used, or have some defects.

yeah. for some items, i've tried to avoid this phenomenon by ordering from, say, homedepot.com, or Lowes.com, but then it seems like they sometimes just send me items with damaged or blemished boxes, or opened product, which they couldn't sell in the brick and mortar retail stores.

For months, the Amazon's Choice for "climbing carabiner" was a carabiner which wasn't even rated or appropriate for climbing.

Looking now, I'm surprised to see they've actually fixed it and have chosen something appropriate. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Black-Diamond-Positron-Screwgate-Pack...

There's merchants that even put fake "Amazon's Choice" banners in their product picture to mislead customers: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/9rawes/fake_...

It's also a pretty blatant violation of Amazon's TOS.

This one was absolutely real.

I use amazon as much as I can, but I would never trust their supply chain with my life or my health. I don't think I would ever buy such an item on their website, nor anything I would apply to my skin or ingest. Even if they displayed a model suitable for climbing, how would you know it is guenine?

The counterfeit problem is real. Like half of their intel 10gbe NIC are counterfeit (I know because a Synology NAS will only work with a guenine model).

Agreed. Amazon has lost my trust here. But, that being said...

With climbing gear, it seems to be less about counterfeits, and more about shady manufacturers / knockoffs with illegitimate safety certifications.

Hot forging takes a lot of work and tooling. I'm not sure there's ever been true counterfeit climbing hardware in the wild.

So Amazon's Choices is products that have been many customer's choice.

Yeah, I suspect the core motivation is to combat paradox of choice. Doing so is in the best interest of both the customer and Amazon.

Right, this makes sense to me. If you can cut down on customers' needs to make a decision, you'll increase the likelihood that someone makes a purchase. Building consumer trust by recommending actually good products is in Amazon's interest here

Yup. There was a famous memo from Jeff that went round years ago that read something like "I want to buy a kettle. I search for 'kettle' and I get thousands of products. That sucks - now I have to comparison shop for kettles, when I don't particularly care what sort of kettle I get. Why can't Amazon just tell me 'buy this one'?"

Amazon's choice arrived years after my tenure at the big A, and I'm not sure it's directly connected, but it definitely helps solve this problem.

That's a blindfold, not a solution.

If I told a personal assistant "I want any kettle", they would know there's an implied <among buy-it-for-life high-quality stainless steel in America with a non-garish finish>.

They would also know me well enough to provide options when it's a non-commodity context, ie pressure cookers where the same implied values hold but I want to actually made the feature tradeoffs as a poweruser.

YouTube went down then global optimization path, and the experience was terrible...

Amazon's Choice in the context that Amazon is other customers here, makes sense. Amazon Customers' Choice essentially.

no, most users are still probably under the impression that "amazon's choice" means more than an automatic algorithmically derived badge. the wording implies a conscious decision was made, but there was none

it would be better phrased as what it truly is: a badge that says "popular item" or similar. even "shopper's choice". the intent of the badge is to sell (as the article states, combat the paradox of choice)

I read this faster than it took Wired to render the text on their article’s page, and I think your comment is more info-dense.

Although the ads & graphics were loaded, with the text highlights in place it looked like a weird redacted document.

If you don't mind me asking: what does an Amazon consultancy mean / do?

I bet the help their customers to position their products to rank better in Amazon search engine and how to sell more.

Amazon Consultants understand brand economics and translating those into Amazon retail economics.

By the time brands are talking to us, they already have products developed OR are actively launching them every year.

I am a software developer/eCommerce marketing guy, so I understand SEO and all the different levers that Amazon offers to get sales momentum moving faster and faster.

Our target market are the large brands, where sales to Amazon is still a rather small portion of their total GMV sales. Them hiring a sales consultant is better ROI (results / investment) than hiring an employee/team full-time internally.

Awesome! Thank you for taking the time to explain!

What does PPM mean in this context?

Pure profit margin (otherwise known as net profit margin)

Net Pure Product Margin after cost of goods sold and various agreed services such as damage allowance are deducted.

Thank you for your input. Do you a blog or provide information for buyers to better find your clients wares?

> conversions

Including conversions from ads?

I would think conversions from ads are weighted the same. Same as reviews from conversions with ads.

If that's true then "Amazon's choice" is based on paid placement but not labeled as an ad.

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