Amazon can smell the blood in Ads. And it’s going for it | Hacker News Reader

Amazon can smell the blood in Ads. And it’s going for it

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> Selling on Amazon has become very similar to gambling in a casino. The lucky few get rich with the millions gambling away their fortunes in the hopes of making it big someday.

> In effect Amazon takes at the minimum of 65% of the product cost as it’s revenue.

> Even worse is that returns are almost always borne by the seller...Amazon goes so far as to charge the sellers for the selling fees, the ad costs, the returns costs and outrageously even the disposal costs for returned items. Sellers lose up to 200% or more of the product cost on every return.

At some point something has to break and people will start leaving for other ecommerce platforms...right?

First those other eCommerce platforms need to show up. I've been looking for PC parts in the EU and there don't seem to be great choices. Newegg has a good interface but their offer in the EU is poor compared to the US.

Amazon filled a lot of these verticals with sometimes the best service they've ever had and often just good enough. Finding someone else for each is hard. But it may be a good business model fot the next 10 years. Spin up good customer-focused eCommerce operations for a vertical you know well in a market that's large enough (US and EU are both huge). Fraud and cut-throat pricing may eat you up though.

>I've been looking for PC parts in the EU and there don't seem to be great choices.

Have you tried online stores in your country? At least in my country many options exist and they have competitive prices. EU-wide ecommerce is a pipe dream

Why should a consumer bother if amazon is the most convenient and reliable?

I supported a local computer shop in Australia. Umart. My $450 monitor had 1 dead pixel out of the box.

I took it back and was declined a refund or exchange; apparently I need 5.

I had to sell it on gumtree and took a $200 loss.

I bought the monitor again for $500 on amazon, and I know if I get a dead pixel, I’ll get returns no questions asked.

To top it off, one of the employees in store was quite unprofessional.

There is no EU-wide Amazon store. There are Amazon stores in some countries, but not all. I think there's no Portuguese Amazon store, which is where the grandparent lives.

It's one of the ways Amazon screwed up in the EU, probably the main one. They don't have a EU-wide site but do ship EU-wide. So you end up shopping across 5+ different Amazon stores, with slightly different prices and offers, all of which will ship to you. It's a problem of their own making.

I just believe it is a very hard problem. Every country speaks a different language, has different regulations, different shipping companies, etc. It would be extremely hard to operate an EU-wide Amazon, and thus they do not.

Amazon already operates EU-wide both on their Logistics (there's only one shared by all) and their frontends (all of them work for all countries and share the same code and login). They've already achieved a superset of what amazon.eu should be. A more likely explanation for why they have IT/FR/ES/UK/DE/etc is that they gave the job of entering each country to different teams.

There is a comparison site called pcpartpicker which I've used to locate hundreds of parts. I'm in the UK not EU, although it does have local sites for most EU countries. Amazon is rarely the cheapest and never the only store it finds, so I usually select other stores despite already paying for Amazon Prime.

I knew of pcpartpicker but had never realized it had a country dropdown that allowed searching for ecommerce sites not in the US. I did find a few ones I hadn't seen before but it seems that none that have the same range as Amazon. So I'd still end up having to order from several places and dealing with different postage costs, return policies, etc. Amazon has the advantage of setting that baseline for a very wide range of products, which removes a lot of friction from the experience. Newegg could probably gain a lot more business if it had a competitive offer with EU shipping, like it does in the US.

If you want to have good overview and search the there is idealo.de (also idealo.fr)

Shopify appears to have a ton of momentum and I've heard it mentioned a few times as a serious future competitor to Amazon's ecommerce business.

There's a chrome extension called "Amazon Lite" that removes all these sponsored ads and listings from your searches. The only part I don't like about the extension is it minimizes nearly the entire Amazon website down to the bare essentials. I would prefer the normal site, minus all the sponsored junk.

It's still an excellent extension that does what it promises. I suggest giving it a shot.

This sounds awful from a seller perspective, but honestly I don’t care. It is also awful from a customer perspective and I care about that a lot. I used to do most of my shopping on Amazon. Now the ux of it all sucks out loud. I’ll search for a product and the first two results are ads for Chinese knockoffs. They’re constantly trying to sell me shit instead of the thing they have, that I want. It’s like walking around a store with a shopping list, but I have to constantly turn down offers to get what I need.

It’s really bad.

You have to remember the truth about ads. They're not for the consumer, they're for gatekeeper.

I think individuals have very power in the equation. The loss of one sale is meaningless.

the answer is ... competition or regulation or maybe journalism. You need a godzilla to fight a godzilla.

I think we just need a well designed alternative market place that addresses the OP points. Good search engine, a somewhat reliable review system, ease of use for both sellers and buyers. One thing to keep in mind, Amazon eCommerce kept loosing money for over a decade. Jeff and the investors focused on the long term. I think this time has come already and they geared up to cash in. They want to cash for today and for yesterday.

To note that this article is some subtle informercial to subscribe to some tool to optimise and automate a sellers ads bidding.

Edit: What a paradox, criticising Amazon for its vampire attitude (takes a cut on the sold price, on shipping costs, on inventory, on returns, on ads). The points are valid, but the author is trying to sell a tool starting at $29 per month + 4.5% of ads cost. This tool could easily be integrated in the Amazon ads system, it wouldn't surprise me.

Yep, the experience has become a complete piece of shit. It looks like an infestation of MBAs. I'm surprised nevertheless, I have always been impressed by Amazon and I didn't expect this short sighted change of direction

I think these things become kind of inevitable in big companies once job-hopping careerists take over most of the decision making, optimizing for the short-term metrics that make them look better. It doesn't help that big companies tend to encourage their performance review / promotion culture over time to be hinged almost entirely on delivering 'impact' through these metrics. Of course it's done in the name of being fair and data-driven.

* But amazon is a 5 star experience [this commenter participated in the amazon vine program]

* I have found shopping this store to be very excellent

[would you like to try amazon student Prime for 73 days?]

* all the other comments are fake this store sucks.

My previous company spent tens of millions on Amazon ads. There was definitely a shift in the past couple years to where it became a necessity. Those in charge just shrugged it off and said it was all part of the game.

Are we paying more through higher prices or are businesses cutting margins?

Anecdotally, I would not say that prices increased due to this specifically. Margins were slightly affected but we made it up in volume.

It incentivized better utilizing data to make smarter choices, and even looking into packaging efficiencies to reduce the volume of the package (and incur less storage and fulfillment costs)

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