Amazon puts its own “brands” first above better-rated products
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851484 (548 points/1 day ago/230 comments)
The Reuters article and this one are two separate investigations, examining different sources.
@dang (does this work? how does one summon dang?)
From a corporate perspective it's a great design because they have such a large market share. Now they just have all other sorting methods broken/useless except their default. Their default sort they can say "algorithms" while waving their hands, and we all just go, ok sounds good and we keep buying. Because as a consumer it's good enough for us.
People used to complain about Walmarts requirements for selling in there stores. Amazon is just as bad.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/28/amazon-pri...
> Retailers have sold private label products for a century or more. Is something different when Amazon does it?
It'd be like if Walmart came to your small town and signed a deal with the local government that stores had to carry their brands in addition to their own or pay higher taxes.
The problem isn't the mere existence of store brands, but the use of anticompetitive practices to promote those brands.
Not really? You can get around amazon's "extremely dominant platform" by setting up a shopify store. I'm not sure how that can be compared to the government forcing you to amazon.
In the traditional brick and mortar situation you can open your own shop next to the Walmart or Target or whatever and have roughly the same visibility. In the online space though rolling your own shopify store is a massive handicap similar to if you weren't allowed to build within 5 miles of a large box store for fear of competition.
A huge number of people literally only shop on Amazon or at least look at Amazon before other locations because they believe it to be representative of the marketplace at large. Maybe that's their loss, but when you also consider Amazon's huge logistics network that nobody else is allowed to use.
No, what really irks me about Amazon is when I search for something and find a thousand products of different brands that are essentially the same, none of which are what I'm looking for. Usually this happens when you want something really specific.
One example, I was looking for a moss pole to train my tropical houseplants on. A requirement for me is a pole with real moss: coco coir doesn't hold enough moisture to build aerial roots on a tropical plant. I search "moss pole" on amazon and for pages and pages I only see coco coir poles of the exact same design (I tried this again right now and I see there's exactly one pole with real moss on the first page, an improvement for now)
This phenomenon has happened to me multiple times, where my search results in dozens of brands of seemingly identical products that aren't in the least what I want. Combined the usual quality problems of these nameless brands, it gets very difficult to buy anything on Amazon unless I already know the exact brand to buy from.
There is a real opportunity for focused web stores out there. Selling only 1 type of product, filtering out crap, having good search, etc...
Not just crap, crap w/ 4.5 star ratings - that when you check find it's 1 star after 1 star after 1 star.
And God help you if you search for something generic. You will see an endless list of the same item from 2000+ rebranding outfits. If you search through a bunch you can see they all use the same product shots just edited slightly. A green star added on a flipped image or the tint adjusted so the colour is different, etc. Maybe their editor was more creative so they photoshopped in a different stock background.
Another thing I have noticed is many resellers on Amazon will use the correct product item in the search result but when you click through it is clear a different, albeit very similar, version of the product. You have to be so so careful to read the product description to ensure you buy the right product. USB items are notorious for this sort of thing with USB-C to C cables shown with two C connectors in the search result image but the actual item is a C to A??!
It is infuriating.
Ironically this was a key differentiator that worked in favour of Amazon against EBay all those years ago.
Amazon went against the tide and introduced "Single Detail Page". An SKU was supposed to get exactly one page no matter how many sellers were selling them. That way customers would be assured of buying the right product they searched for.
As a customer, it's sad to see that principle being obliterated. Their catalog has become a cesspool of all sorts of knockoffs and fraudulent sellers.
So now we are back to square one hoping someone would do to Amazon what Amazon did to Ebay.
What Amazon does is the equivalent of putting their products up front and the alternatives (even those that are better rated) in a back room.
Is amazon burying results on the second or third page of the results or something? If it's one row down on the results page, it's closer to being one shelf down (which stores are known to do[1]), than "in a back room".
[1] https://traxretail.com/blog/eye-level-buy-level-importance-s...
When I look for something on Amazon the higher rated item is often below the fold. Being below the fold makes a huge difference to buyers. Sometimes I see it on the second page.
These are two very different ways of displaying things.
That depends heavily on the type of product being sold. For small/low volume items, they'll be side by side as you mentioned, but for big/high volume items, they're definitely going to be placed on different levels. Overall, this behavior isn't because stores are fair or anything, but that they're subject to space constraints. Where space constraint isn't an issue (ie. for big/high volume items), brick and mortar retailers also engage in discrimination to make certain products more visible.
I'm skeptical that placing products "below the fold" is any worse than what brick and mortar retailers engage in. Isn't "the fold" just a row that's slightly higher than the organic results? I'm not sure how having to scroll a few more inches is any way comparable to having to go to the backroom.
With the fold on a web page you have to scroll and keep scrolling for something to come into the visible space. For shelves you can look at a wall and see, even if not at the focal point, other items.
In my personal experience, it's much easier to spot and look at the alternatives on store shelves than it is to navigate sites and look for comparable things.
I am sure Amazon executives don't care, because most consumers are price-motivated, not quality motivated, but I basically only buy things online directly from the manufacturer now or an authorized brick and mortar retailer I can call on the phone and get confirmation of the product before receiving it. Amazon is just full of garbage, mostly "brands" that are all the same Chinese junk off Alibaba, and if it is a major brand, it ends up often being counterfeit. Completely untrustworthy, and it makes me sad, because historically as a consumer I liked the experience of buying on Amazon.
What's more shocking is unprompted, my parents and siblings are also now avoiding Amazon. In many cases they've been buying through Walmart with in-store pickup, because that fits into their day-to-day life and has a much higher quality bar. Yes, Walmart quality is higher than Amazon quality in basically every product category.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
tl;dr "Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show"
I only buy stuff on Amazon after running it through FakeSpot, because metareviews are what we’ve come to now. If that site could ever make itself as indispensable for everyone, it’d have a chokepoint to steer people away from Amazon, especially as better prices are often found elsewhere.
The best days of Amazon are behind it.
I use Prime (free via ISP) less because their search is (intentionally, I believe) utterly broken.
My last Prime purchase used Google image search; item I bought never shows up on Amazon searches.
If all you want is to be lied to or cheated then I guess it makes sense.
I accept as fact that you believe it.
As recently as yesterday, I found Amazon items w/ 4.5 * rating and topped with 1 * reviews. I find insufficient reason to trust anything on Amazon by default.
Authentic broken stuff doesn't bring a lot of comfort - and it's harder to avoid crap when 4.5 * review totals are actually dominated by 1 * reviews.
Then, if it is Amazon branded and it's crap, you buy one and then you know to not buy this anymore. When you go over reviews, you can trust that these are genuine, not a bunch of paid shills pumping up +++++. You can make informed decision much more reliably. That's not the case with third-party products
And finally: if I was a store owner and allowed other people's goods to be sold, I too would put my own goods onto a much more attractive shelf. That is not a lie. When customer buys something and it's broken, he'll come after me. That's a hassle. When these are my goods, and I know where these goods came from, I would definitely want to promote them over third-party items. Maybe these items are as good as mine, maybe not - I don't know. Yes, I'd still sell them since they bring me extra profit, but since I'm on the hook for their quality and I have no control over their quality, that's much less attractive sale for me.
This would apply better if retailers hid competing items on the back of shelves or in locations that can only be unlocked by 3rd parties (eg: using Google search to find product Amazon won't show you).
The available documents show that its an official Amazon strategy.