Everything on Amazon Is an Ad

Between this issue, the general untrustworthiness of the reviews, and the fact that I can quite often find a better deal on masking tape, undershirts, or whatever else at my local brick-and-mortar store or a more specialized big-box retailer’s website, I actually rarely shop at Amazon anymore. I do still buy there—especially for certain categories, such as streaming videos—but I used to do SO much of my shopping at Amazon. All in all, Amazon just doesn’t feel to me like the outstanding store, the “shiny object” that I once thought of it as—it feels much more like a typical “rent-seeking” operation. But clearly they aren’t suffering for it—so they must be doing something right. *shrug*

Somewhat embarrassingly, I didn’t realize that all those products were ads. I thought their recommendation algorithms were getting worse

When you walk in a traditional store and there's a big display of Coca Colas arranged like a turkey right at the entrance for thanksgiving that's not the store trying to help the consumer. This is just how stores have always been merchandised.

When a store owns its own inventory it is natural to tailor recommendations to optimise margin gain - its largely testament to the technological illiteracy of brick and mortar stores that margin is rarely factored into personalised web positions such as search results. It is very much factored in when designing store layouts, catalogues, and ad campaigns.

In all these other places there is a contention between getting the customer exactly what they might want (discovery) and getting the customer to buy what you want. Note that stores want the customer to buy items that will most cost them (overstock) as well as items that will most profit them.

This way the store manages this contention becomes a key part of its public image / brand, and affects its long term perception and customer base.

How this heavy push from personalised recommendations to personalised advertising will affect amazon is going to be interesting.

Those advertising categories are nearly identical to the product recommendations: both are collaborative filtering algorithms. Thinking that one framed as an as vs product suggestions seems naive to me. They fill the pages with more products to click with the best efficiency they can muster.

At what point does this start to cut down on actual sales volume?

eBay (mentioned in the article) has gotten pretty bad in this way lately. There are plenty of categories where the sponsored listings are a tiny or non-representative subset of the whole.

So if you start browsing by jumping from suggestion to suggestion, you rapidly exhaust the available paid listings. Will customers recognize they aren't seeing everything, then continue to dig and search to find more, or will they decide they're out of luck and leave?

I could imagine tweaking it to a feed where paid listings are n times more likely to be shown, but filling in a few slots from random unadvertised products in the category.

Is there a ublock list for these?

I noticed this as well. They need to get their act together before they lose (more) trust.

Selling shelf space is not a new concept, it's just another part of the squeeze.