Ask HN: Why is Prime Day so hard? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Prime Day so hard?

22 pointsNikolaNovak19 comments

I do 70+ orders with Amazon a year; I have 6 themed wishlists; many items I purchase repeatedly, or items like it; 75% of my purchases should be easily identifiable as belonging to a category + subcategory (Computers - Video Games; Music - Synthesizers; Books - SciFi; Baby Stuff - Male Toddler; etc).

And yet for 3-4 years running I have not bought a single thing on Prime day; going through pages of hundreds of assorted random items results in failure and frustration. If there IS a deal that appeals to me, it's well hidden and I cannot find it.

It feels like in this day and age, a 3rd year ComSci student with Python knowledge and few open source libraries should be able to fill up my cart :P

So why don't I (or any of my friends - they all seem to share the perspective) have more luck with Prime day? Is it a business decision of some sort?

More broadly, for all the incredible privacy-invading technologically-ingenious, morally-dubious tracking and advertising, why don't I get exposed to things I actually want - why does so much effort get put into something with so little seeming business value? What am I as a consumer missing in this whole analytics/advertising ecosystem? :-/

I see Prime Day as their way to clear the warehouse shelves. You're right, best would be to present products to the user they actually want. But maybe the aim is to display those products which usually aren't displayed, the long tail, the random ones.

(Used to work at Amazon, but back then they didn't have Prime Day yet).

I agree with this. Their goal is to get people to buy the stuff they normally wouldn't. They know you're already going to buy your normal items, so cutting you a break on those doesn't help them. Instead, they want you to buy that steam vacuum that you'll use a couple times and then forget about it or realize those messy kids never give the time to use it.

Isn't it a big load test? Make sure the right number of servers have been bought for Q4, and scaling bugs get fixed

As much as there are lots of people working on AI suggestion algorithms, I have not seen much suggested to me be close to what I want usually. This goes for Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, etc. They all seem to think whatever I bought/watched recently must be like the only thing I'm interested in.

Just some basic logic could weed out stuff from suggestions - if I buy a fairy princess doll (for a niece) but all my other purchases are tools, computer/electronics, video games, household supplies, etc. then obviously that was a gift or one time type of purchase, even if I shipped it to myself. Don't make suggestions for more fairy princess doll like products because that is the last thing I bought.

I would think they could group users together anonymously and provide trending suggestions based on that. I'm sure there are lots of people with similar sets of categories and they are buying/watching things.

The Netflix Top 10 in the US list is a start in that direction.

Unfortunately Amazon seems more motivated to suggest advertised products (actual advertised ones and ones with inflated fake ratings), their own products and probably stuff they want to get out of warehouses before caring or tracking what a customer is actually interested in.

Them caring about what you want doesn't make them more money.

This Prime Day, Amazon tried to advertise cloth dryers of a certain brand to me via its AI suggestion algorithm - because I bought one of these dryers six weeks ago from Amazon.

Of course I don't need any more dryers, thanks Amazon, I'm good with one, and by suggesting the exact same model to me that I already bought, the only thing you have achieved is rubbing it in that I could have saved almost 100€ had I waited six weeks with my purchase. I'm not exactly sure about the psychological value of this (anyone here who knows whether such actions are of any positive or negative value to a retailer doing it? My gut tells me it's not a good idea to incentivize the user to wait for sales, but that's just my gut...), but there's definitely no use to advertise cloth dryers to someone who just bought one a few weeks ago.

That should be an easy category to weed out - one time purchases.

Their algorithms aren't even aware of what the products are, its just "find last 3 things purchased and suggest those."

The main goal is similar to other holiday sales -- a handful of loss leaders and a lot of crap they hope you buy along the way.

The first few prime days had a lot of real deals on name brand stuff. More and more, deals on name brand items are less common or supply constrained. Other 'deals' were fake deals (discount off artificially high list price) or deals on random no-name products (or garbage products).

Another thing to consider - as Amazon has further shifted inventory burden to 3rd party sellers, there is less Amazon owned inventory to discount.

How much do 3rd party/FBA sellers participate in prime days’ official deals? I could see manufacturers doing their own deals, not sure about others.

A better question is why do you care so much? This isn't some kind of national holiday you are missing out on, it's a company trying to get you to spend money. If you find the way the do it annoying - don't buy anything or shop elsewhere.

Few reasons

1. Natural curiosity. Amazon is big and successful and highly optimized. There's a reason for their strategy approach and presentation so I'd be curious to understand it and learn something.

2. It is suboptimal from my personal perspective as a consumer so I'm wondering how can it be / why isn't it optimized. Am I a weird edge case? Am I not falling for some trick I'm not even seeing?

3. Is the state of the art not as far along as I thought it might be?

Etc :)

They're optimizing for their needs, not yours.

Why would they optimize for your needs? You're already a loyal consumer, to the extent that you're vaguely upset about a missed opportunity to go on a spending spree.

It really seems more beneficial for them to just apply a markdown to items that are doing nothing but taking up space in their warehouses. If that's what they're doing, you're searching through the list of stuff they want to get rid of, so that's a win for them even if you don't buy anything (because it's not like you won't look through them next year; you said you've done it three times in a row already?)

I keep hearing all these platforms know so much about me. I’ve been waiting for them to recommend something awesome that I can’t live without. I’ve been waiting 20 plus years.

Learn and be curious ;)

Physical store optimize for you wasting time in them, not for your convenience (e.g. most bought items, such as bread, are always at the back of the store). I don't see a reason why Amazon would be different.

I think there are two issues here.

1. Prime day just doesn't have a lot of really good deal. They've got the usual Amazon stuff that are legit sales, and a few other items.

Beyond that it's mostly second rate stuff on sale and a bunch of non sale stuff advertised as on sale.

2. I wonder about how crappy advertising is all the time. I've git lists of things I might want and I never see adds for those things ... mostly things I already bought or stuff I don't care about.

I suspect the truth is whatever AI there is or advertising that is there, it isn't FOR us, it is pointed AT US. It's there to try to make us do what someone else wants... so they advertise women's clothing ... to me ... a guy, with no interest in those things because they're motivated to sell that, not what I want.

For the advertising - the stuff you want to buy doesn't need the advertising to sell it to you, so who's paying to show it to you? The point of the advertising ecosystem is to make you want to buy stuff you don't already want to buy

I use to buy items on prime day. I totally forgot about it this year, and was surprised that it was prime day yesterday.

I was looking for a mechanical pencil last night when I stumbled onto the fact it was prime day. I think the biggest trouble this year is the categories. Rather than just showing me some popular products on sale, they want me to drill down into categories. This is my opinion was not a good strategy.

Thought I'd chime in with a recommendation: I bought a "TUL 0.7" (they have other diameters) at home depot and really like it. It has a matte texture with good grip, and overall seems really well built. I've been using it for about 6-7 months.

My one minor complaint is that often when I erase something, I will accidentally and repeatedly "click" and the lead extends out.

It's available on amazon as well.

The simplest solution would be for them to implement a search for prime day deals only but I didn't see an option for that.

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