Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
Just like nobody ever opens page 2 of Google search, people rarely scroll down very far on Amazon's product search page. These "ads" just put the highest bidders' products at the top-K spots (and K keeps increasing) so that customers aren't see the most relevant products, just the ones who paid the most money.
Amazon spent 20+ years building customer trust. Now it's reaping its reward by selling it off wholesale.
I think this is hyperbolic. In my experience, they continue to deliver great products at reasonable prices, especially given inflation. I can regularly find the same products cheaper on Amazon than local brick and mortar retailers, as well as online Walmart and other online venues. If this is selling off my trust, they can keep selling it.
They capture at easily 50% of the goods I purchase.
That said for me it's not because they compete on price or quality. its convenience being in an apartment building with the nearest big box everything store being 15-20 minutes drive from me.
So I don't.
Well duh, the Chinese gov subsidizes their products to crush American businesses. Amazon is apathetic because of exactly what you say. Price is all that matters.
I don't shop at Amazon
I have no interest in eBay 2.0.
You could bid $100 on your own brand KWs and get charged $0.37/click while a competitor in the adjacent slot will get charged $25. You could bid $100 on a competitor's brand KW and never get an impression because the algo has determined your product is a complete waste of that virtual shelf space.
I would think it’s like an auction for the things that don’t matter. For the most valuable brand KWs do you think the winner is randomly allowed to be determined by “the market”? Why not bring the brand to the table directly, and outside of the auction determine what they’ll have to pay.
To me, it seems like no company could keep their hands out of the cookie jar that is running an auction. Too much short term pressure to move things up and to the right. Amazing cash cow though.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsorblock and a few others. Ads are still everywhere. Not as everywhere as they'd be without it, but it's not like adblocks get rid of them all together.
> Sponsored segments on YouTube
I only watch music videos and very rarely a how to repair video.
> Billboards
I guess I sometimes see those in US TV shows ;)
> newspapers
I think I remember those things ;)
> is hiring
I guess, never saw those as ads. Though now that I think about it, I have started to want to figure out what BuildZoom does with custom homes, why YC funded them, and why I should care. Maybe one day I’ll see enough hiring posts to google them ;)
YC companies pay money to put a message in front of us, in the hope that some of us will respond by taking an action that is highly profitable for them. Seems pretty clearly ads to me!
>I guess I sometimes see those in US TV shows ;)
Lucky. In Helsinki they're in every metro station, every bus stop, and sometimes just in random spots along busy streets. Oh, and every metro car has screens playing video ads.
Frankly, these are minor annoyances. The people who get emotionally overwhelmed by them perhaps should resolve that internally rather than externally. Life is never going to be free from minor annoyances.
> The people who get emotionally overwhelmed by them perhaps should resolve that internally rather than externally.
What you're insinuating here is quite frankly insulting, brings nothing of value to what I was trying to say and the only thing I can offer you in return is to tell you to go fuck yourself.
I do buy things, but each purchase is carefully considered.
Happier, wealthier, all good
Not because the suggestions are amazingly good - sometimes they're ok - but because when they lead to some crap-infested site I can click to not see that site any more. That ability to cull keeps the suggestions workable for me.
I genuinely think the Google would benefit hugely by making this a possibility with their search engine. With the coming flood of chatgpt-generated shit sites, they have so much to gain by enabling human curation, even if page impressions take a hit.
Ffs Google, provide your users with a way to blacklist the more abominable parts of the internet and you'll engender serious customer loyalty and stickiness.
Don't you have better use for your time? Normalizing the disaster that has become the internet (and absolving the key actors in that development) is robbing us all from experiencing a more sane online life.
These lists will of course be at risk of the same pressures as ad blockers, with incentives for list maintainers to accept bribes to remove entries.
But over time, the quality of the lists will improve and so too will the quality of the UX for users of the aforementioned extensions. That is, assuming the goose isn't cooked already.
https://searchengineland.com/googles-personal-blocklist-dele...
This has been the best way to watch YouTube on Android. The video keeps playing in the background too and no ads of course.
Go to amazon search for product. Find something that looks reasonable.
Confirm review section has a reasonable distribution of stars and check out a few 1 and 3/4 star reviews (hope they're written by a human) and see if there are any deal breakers.
Go to google and enter "<amazon product I'm interested in> reddit reviews".
Go to reddit read reviews and hope they're not written by astroturf accounts, bots, or chatgpt (have to manually review accounts).
If reddit confirms the product is okay, then I check if I can find it directly on a company site to order direct.
If yes, have to confirm with reddit again to make sure the site is reliable and does returns / replacements, etc.
If yes, buy direct. If no, go back to amazon to buy product there.
I have to go to other sites and find the actual products and then search directly on amazon. It won’t be long before I just stop using amazon altogether.
I also like that they close the purchase feature for Shabbat. That feels nice, like a personal touch to an anonymous website.
Crazy idea: skip that step, buy somewhere else
Finding a reputable online retailer, with customer service, competitive pricing, and fast delivery that has your product in stock is hard. Managing a list of niche retailers that meet those requirements, one for electronics, one for home goods, one for furniture, etc. etc. is not something people want to do. Convenience drives behavior, and until there's an aggregator that does a good enough job (Google shopping or whatever isn't it), convenience will still drive people to Amazon.
Maybe five years ago. Not now
No need to cover Canada, the EU, and other regions that Amazon supports. US only is fine.
Every shop I used to shop at has an e-commerce presence
Some are just getting used to it, but most are great
Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search.
Ironically Amazon has been so aggressive with the ads recently I've lost all trust in searching on Amazon itself. I'm back to using Google to find the Amazon product page.
On Amazon I search for a specific brand and model and it's on page 4, buried until endless sponsored products. I have to go my order history to find the product page now. Sometimes the Amazon search is not just all endless products but literally incorrect products, stuff that I would have to return if I bought it by accident. Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.
Amazon product search feels not just bad but actively hostile, something I have to fight against to find the thing I actually want.
I wish this was a joke, but they did increase the cost of prime to pay for that trash, rather than focusing on what people really use Prime for.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ama...
And I very much enjoyed the Lord of the Rings series they did. High production quality and pretty good story telling. But I suppose I am easily entertained.
People keep going on about AI but the worlds most valuable company is incapable of arranging shit they sell into correct categories. You could be looming for a toothbrush and they will sell you a car seat.
Alza.cz delivers all over EU, they have an actual human categorise their stock, and it's a much better experience.
They don't sell absolutely everything, but they have electronics, Scooters, teslas, home appliances - you name it.
Amazon could improve their usability so much by providing proper metadata entry systems for sellers and enforce their proper usage by moderating their platform.
But that costs money, there are more than enough customers still buying stuff off of Amazon and the real cash cow is AWS anyway.
This exact thing happened to me. One of the problems, was that the bulb I was looking at, had a specific mini-candelabra socket, and the ones they showed me, had one that was just slightly larger, but looked almost identical (and the name was also “mini candelabra”). This was one of those “recommendations,” in the list at the bottom.
I actually ordered the wrong bulbs, based on this, and had to return them.
I have also had Amazon direct me to gray market and counterfeit goods, with extreme confidence; often insisting that the dodgy product was being sold by the manufacturer.
I now order direct from the manufacturer, for anything over about $50, even if I pay more (happens less frequently, these days. Amazon is no longer the bargain it used to be, and even gray market now sells for full retail). Sometimes, the manufacturers use Amazon for fulfillment, but I don’t mind, as they direct me to the real product.
It’s not 100% Amazon’s fault, as the scammers have figured out how to game the system, but Amazon is not trying to fix it. I assume that this is because they make so much money.
I have heard, anecdotally, that selling on Amazon has become a nightmare, for legit sellers; especially small ones. The scammers have no problem, putting up with B.S., but real sellers can drown.
Here’s something I experienced, a couple of years ago, when I was looking for a stand for my phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25582762 (the links in that post no longer do what they did, back then).
Same thing happened to eBay, any attempt to cut down on the scammers just reduced the number of actual real sellers, until basically there's nothing but scammers left for large swaths of the site.
Which is sometimes exactly what people want.
This is where ads really break the user experience. When I search for a specific air filter by model number it will prioritize ads for different air filters above the listings of air filters that are actually compatible.
Checking out on Amazon is easy. Everything else from the searching to the filtering to the reviews is openly user hostile.
2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up.
3) Google Search tech / product itself sucks. Power queries no longer work. This might be hard to unwind from as revenue numbers are propped up by answering "dumb queries" with ads.
4) AI will eat search's lunch. You'll increasingly ask LLMs, and these LLMs will push search ad revenue to a much lower margin, especially if the goal is to gain a reputation for quality.
Google has to figure this out quick. 50% of their revenue is from search. I think they're checkmated. There's no way out except to build something new and hope it works. That wouldn't be easy for anyone, but Google especially hasn't shown a history or aptitude for doing this.
Am I old? What kind of information. Not to be on Googles side here but, for information in video form... YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still. Right?
There's everything from OSint TikTok to finance TikTok to archeologist TikTok... It's crazy, and it's good.
Once you find your niche, the information density approaches that of a black hole. It's really high quality.
And I get us on HN are a particular cohort, but is there really as much depth of information? Literally had to help a family member fix their jeep over the holidays and "replace fuel pump jeep Cherokee 1998" is just not something I think Tiktok would be good at. Idk I should try and install it sometime i guess.
And then also, at least i've noticed on Instagram (and occasionally FB), that like sometimes I see something. Forget about it, click elsewhere, and then cant go back to find it again? Vs /feed/history and even browser history on Youtube?
Edit: Is this normal? I cant even search for videos on tiktok.com without an account?
it only requires that you do it.
you don't need to study hard to learn to cook.
The average person can learn to cook from someone who already can do it (usually it's your parents...) in a week. It usually happens at the age of 15. From then on it's only a matter of practicing and experimenting. It doesn't require a tutor, contrary to what TV shows like master chef wants to sell to you.
I learned how to cook looking at my mom doing it and then tried some recipe from this book series from the '60s that were very popular in many homes when I was a kid.
It's easier than learning how to bike or walk.
https://www.ibs.it/in-cucina-con-fantasia-10-libri-vintage-w...
So? Millions of people lack basic skills, like 1/3 of the population struggles with digital skills.
Some skills are basic but obscure - maintenance of a bicycle is a basic, but if you never has a bicycle, you won't have it.
Or maybe prepping a live fish for cooking.
You mean people can't use their hands?
Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills that mostly boil down to "they don't know software products" but they also "don't care about them" and it's a very very very broad field, many people take for granted their knowledge about complex stuff, but basic "digital skills" are easily learned through simply doing it. Just like cooking, but less useful.
Coincidentally, I never used TikTok, I don't know how it works, it's one of the few Chinese stuff that I really don't care about (but it's ironically loved by Americans who also hate China for everything else). Based on this sentence many people would say that I lack basic digital skills, but I am also a professional software engineer since 1996. Many of the things that are basic digital skills for me, are advanced stuff for people who only use a smartphone. Many basic skills, like using a real keyboard, are alien to touchscreen natives. And so on. TikTok is not a skill, but if it was I would lack that skill.
Meanwhile cooking is something that anybody can do, even chimps ca do it
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/03/chimpanzees-...
> Some skills are basic but obscure - maintenance of a bicycle is a basic, but if you never has a bicycle, you won't have it.
as I've said, biking is harder than cooking.
> Or maybe prepping a live fish for cooking.
If you cook it in its entirety in the oven or on a grill, it will be edible, and will taste good.
Or fry it, fried lattarini are cooked exactly like that, you eat them whole.
https://www.tusciatimes.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/lattar...
Virtually every animal that is not an insect can be cooked the same way: open the belly, remove internal organs, cook it. Done. .
Fancy recipes are not "cooking", there's the same distance between playing soccer with your friends and being a professional soccer player.
Saying that TikTok helped someone to learn how to cook is misleading, the merit is of the person that started doing it and learned how to do it by doing it.
Replace TikTok with "grandma book of recipe" and the result is the same.
TikTok has no real value in this story, it just happened that someone used it for inspiration because that's what that person knew. Coincidence is not the same thing of correlation.
Have you seen British newbuilt homes? They must be using their feet!
> Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills
So is filling doing paperwork and navigating beurocracy.
We have an entire proffesion dedicates to doing just that, and every year thousands of people get in trouble because they ticked a wrong box in a form.
yep, exactly, that's why I pay people to do it, unless I'm required by the law to do it personally.
One that the vast majority of people suck at. Either it's not basic or something else is wrong ... like how hard it is to learn new skills.
Correct.
The difference is that computing needs a lot of prior knowledge, including what computing means and which branch of computing you want to learn.
But writing a Word document and printing it it's absolutely attainable in 1 day.
Cooking, as in cooking your meals at home, for yourself or your family, is only a bit more complicated than preparing the breakfast.
Which is something that anybody (IMHO) can do.
Cooking a simple meal anybody can learn, just as typing a Word document and printing it. More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.
Wikipedia to the rescue, as usual
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software.
now go to the average person, ask them what an algorithm is and be prepared to be disappointed.
Ask them what a pressure cooker or filleting is and you won't be.
> just as typing a Word document and printing it
that's not computing, that's typewriting.
typewriting is easy, as the adage says: monkeys can do it and eventually write Shakespeare.
> More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.
Not really.
More complicated cooking mostly takes more time, but it's not really more difficult. I would argue that many people can make cakes which is some of the more complicated food one can cook, but they amusingly say they can't cook.
Making sushi it's easy, but it needs a very long preparation.
More complicated computer stuff requires a lot of studying and you have to learn a lot of concepts that have no other use outside of computing world.
Amusingly I just discovered that TikTok is actually a very good educational platform but only for Chinese people in China.
The Chinese version of the popular short video app TikTok, known as Douyin, will force users in China who are under 14 years old to use the so called teenage mode that will limit them to 40 minutes a day between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. to ensure they get adequate sleep. Endless zombie-like scrolling is interrupted by mandatory 5-second delays. They’re also only shown specially-selected “inspiring” content.
The algorithm is vastly different, promoting science, educational and historical content in China
I don't know for sure if this is some form of Chinese propaganda, but assuming it's true, compared to the content that is more prominent in the rest of the World, it becomes increasingly hard to call ourselves "advanced societies".
TikTok encourages the opposite: so content creators cram in as much information as possible, often speeding up music and talking. Sometimes with supercuts to even minimize the natural pauses between words. The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s and shares more similarities with a lightning talk and slide deck than a video.
You could listen to an audio book at 10x speed, but would you retain much of it?
I guess i would say, TikTok information is the personification of the meme of "How to Draw an Owl" quick and short. But does it convey enough information, could a longer form be better?
I can watch YouTube on a television though.
And, just like a book, I can skip the parts I'm not interested in.
Are we at the point that research has become something that should be so effortless that even the tiniest annoyance is considered bad?
> so content creators cram in as much information as possible
> The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s
which is exactly the opposite of good information.
A lightning talk it's not information, it's an hint to something that should sparkle your interest, nobody actively search for lightning talks as a form of research.
At school I studied Roman history for ever, it's not like that Roman history is really that complicated (it is vast, it spans a very long time and there are many names and many battles, but still not complex stuff) it's that persistence of knowledge requires time, repetition and going into details.
You can cram Roman history in two paragraphs, but that's not information, that's trivia.
But mostly, good information requires reputation: you can't just take a 2 minute video crammed into 30 seconds chipmunk high pitch voice and call it "information". That's just someone talking about stuff, as far as the use knows, it could be 100% bullshit (and probably is).
I'm not learning Roman History from youtube/tiktok, I'm trying to figure out how to factory reset my parents DVR. 10 minutes of rambling is not useful.
I'm matching the tone of the comment I'm replying to.
> If you don't like what people say you don't have to read or listen.
Speaking of irony ... you can also just move along.
Youtube shorts is trying to get in the mix, but no matter how I try to curate my feed, there's always around 30% bald men bullshitting mixed in (Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and a bunch of bad comedians). Their algorithm is strongly geared towards controversy, and I guess it works to increase engagement, but only for people who don't realize how toxic and unhealthy it is to watch stuff like that.
Not really. YouTube is a mess due to advertising. You have to wade through tons of trash to find good content.
In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT.
AI will very soon be perfectly capable of generating human sounding reviews. It just needs to "dumb down" the tone a bit to be believable.
We will have to face a reality where nothing on the internet can be trusted. Ironically traditional news outlets will probably become more relevant again.
Maybe a future edition of ChatGPT can discern a real human review from a content farm returned by Google Search.
Once ads are added there is, again, a motivation to make replies very long and rambly. Even now I begin getting "annoyed":
Yes it's grammatically correct and "humanly" sounding but all I really want is five dashes with ingredients and instructions for an apple pie.
Given enough time, I'm confident the "Certainly I can help you. Here's what you need to..." will once again turn into a paragraph or two to have more opportunities to sell to advertisers.
The economics still don't seem to favor brief responses.
Medical and health-related queries are particularly screwed. Every top result is practically the same gamified SEO trash with filler content.
I also don't know who told Google to ignore the keywords in my search query and show me a cluttered page that targets "topics" instead of keywords.
The search engine of Google has rapidly deteriorated, but people still go mainly to Google when they want or need to purchase something.
AI can not make contracts with humans and make a sale. People selling online instead of making free content seem to be the most protected against AI right now. An AI can never deal with money responsibilities.
Google's strongest arm right now are maps, where they are superior. Apple is finally catching up, and could compete with Google if they changed some of their truly idiotic maps policies. For what it's worth, Apple could probably easily destroy Google as a search engine, and they have the conservative attitude to make them a good candidate.
I'm not sending my purchase intent to Amazon. In fact I am ensuring I don't give them ads results via SEO (e.g., -site:amazon.com).
I don't want Amazon ads in my results which I know were forcibly generated at runtime by overriding competitors (i.e., breaking/hacking Google Search).
I don't want to purchase an item from Amazon knowing it could contain an empty box and/or defective product (i.e., no quality control), will take 5x as long to arrive, and I may not even receive a refund in the event I try to return the item.
Give me a service better than Amazon. I'm tired of being served subpar everything by them. Especially when they treat their employees and customers like trash. No thanks.
I think it's not visitors, but repeat users which makes it possible and so valuable. This is going to be the next phase of Adtech. Uber has a $500M run rate from ads, Walmart has $2.7B (from the same article), and evidently more and more companies will discover, if you can aggregate traffic to some decent level, you can monetize it with first party data. This advantage is only going to increase once we see Android launch their own version of tracking consent, and Chrome gets rid of cookies. A good horizontal play here is to sell targeting, attribution, and profiling services to all these "aggregators of traffic".
Not sure about the revenues per se, but I think Doordash, Expedia, Robinhood, Airbnb could also potentially generate ad revenue at low cost just based how much traffic (and repeat users) they get
It operates exactly the same as your regional airbnb once you switch the location and currency. For example, switching to USD and searching for apartments in California
I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-res photographing shelf-positioning in a massive supermarket chain. Every aisle. And then eye-scanning tests and analysis on legibility meant it was all used to upsell brands fighting for premium positioning.
This is certainly a trend led, I am guessing, by troves of internal search data that suggests people are searching for things they don't have the capacity to stock themselves.
"Do you stock purple widgets?" "No, we're Red Widget Emporium" is not an inappropriate answer. If anything, it improves the trust angle-- you're the experts on Red Widgets rather than a mile-wide-six-inches-deep generalist. I generally don't want to buy sheet lumber and breakfast cereal at the same store.
"We'll pretend we stock it but actually hand you to a second tier vendor who you'd never go to directly" is less compelling somehow.
In a way, it does help a specialist differentiate him/herself in the market though. I am tending to buy more from small, specialist retailers for this very reason.
And for awhile you can continue to search "shipped and sold by Company" but eventually that goes away, because the marketplace shit is pure profit for them.
It sells out the brand and turns them all into eBay/Alibaba clones and it's a major danger sign.
More and more I have to restrict Walmart to "stocked in store" to avoid useless crap.
The other development is having to check online reviews before purchasing just about anything. Previously, if I bought shelf brackets or similar, I could usually rely on the fact that they were stocked at at a reliable store to mean they were decent enough quality. They'd passed some sort of review. If they were terrible, they'd be pulled from shelves. But that's no longer the case. More and more cheap, unfit-for-purpose goods are being sold by formerly solid stores. They'll accept returns but keep stocking 1-star items and hoping most people forget to return. I've checked reviews and been saved by 1-2 star averages suggesting the manifold splits first use or the shelf supports a tenth of the rated weight.
Best Buy and Walmart do this too (allowing third-parties to list products on their website).
Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website?
I think ads play the biggest part in why the Internet is so fill with junk today, to the point you have to sift through mountains of trash to find something genuinely useful.
That said, there isn't a better alternative so I just ignore the ads and go for the product no matter how far down the page that product appears.
It's not what they think you want, they probably know exactly what you want.
It's what they're being paid to shill to you. It's more profitable for them to take that money and put you through a bad experience than to just sell stuff to you.
I feel the same way about writing suggestions in Gmail and “fuzzy search” common on a lot of sites. What’s the deal with this apparent trend of constantly trying to second-guess user intention?
Go to Walmart.com or Target.com and you can filter for items sold by Walmart and Target.
Or eBay and Aliexpress. What Amazon is good for is cheap $20 to $100 items that you want the ability to easily return for a refund.
Why would you think this? An IRL analogue is that the grocery store is full of ads and displays meant to catch your attention — paid for by the food/product manufacturers.
Those definitely exist if you count ads from the bank itself (eg. upsells)
Like many things people criticize Amazon for "starting", this has a long history in retail. When you walk into a store and see an attractive display at the end of an aisle full of products from one brand, that is a "end cap" and is something that brand paid for.
- can pay for having product on higher shelves - can pay for more “facing” (width) on the shelf - packaging is itself a kind of ad
The store is essentially just collecting rent and selling the goods on consignment. Amazon does the same and you know, doesn't provide any real support for those sales.
“May I recommend the salmon today sir?” often means the chef got a good price on it and the restaurant will gross more.
Source: a friend of mine who bused tables for a few years. Not sure that’s statistically relevant in any way, but it’s an interesting anecdote.
They also use their customer data to sell ads off the Amazon site.
Source: I sell on Amazon and one of my products is Amazon's choice for something.
edit: or less sarcastically, the problem with Amazon is the trash and counterfeits that they're selling, and that they're willing to promote garbage to the top for cash. It's that Amazon has no respect for its own reputation as a store or a marketplace. It's not that Amazon sells products for money.
Sorry to burst you bubble but this is how all of retail works including physical stores. From the moment you walk into a store everything you see from what products are “on sale” to the floor displays to where on the shelf an item appears is all “an advertisement” paid for by the product maker. The fact that you thought this was all like just a shop keeper assembling items to their preference is quaint. Amazon is simply a digital version of what stores have been doing since essentially the beginning of stores.
That all includes private label too. People criticize Amazon for selling their own products for less than brand names, but walk into any store and you’ll see the same thing with store or house brands. Again, this is all standard retail practice and not some evil new scheme.
Even the placement on store shelves is paid for. The prime shelf space costs more than the bottom shelf, for example.
Most large grocers outsource all of this management to intermediary firms that “manage” shelf space for chains, selling and updating their retail merchandising based on marketing campaigns and sales data.
You may find good pricing on brands/products on the lowest shelf, as they tend to be smaller firms that compete with the large players that pay premium for shelf-space, which is sustained by higher pricing.
That's old. It seems like every time I login I get a promo of some sort pushing me to sign up for some product offering they have. New low rate this, new high rate that. And you can't block them. It's a full page. I can't get my account page to load until I click "not interested" or something.
[1]: https://thepointsguy.com/credit-cards/credit-card-merchant-o...
Whenever I have a transaction with my brokerage, Chase adds a note telling me how much better Chase's investment arm is than them in my transaction feed.
I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...
Monster may have paid Best Buy to be on the shelf, but at least I have some guarantee that Best Buy actually bothered to check that the HDMI cable is actually an HDMI cable (and if it wasn't, would notice and pull it eventually).
Amazon lets anyone sell anything, and then takes a cut in multiple ways.
"You may be required to pay a slotting fee to, in effect, purchase shelf space if there is a great deal of competition fighting for the same space."
no difference than paying for shelf space.
"In 2021 Amazon ad revenue [was] more than the entire global newspaper industry."
Hence some of the comments focus on newspaper business.
Political ads.
You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
And Duverger's law [0] leading to a duopoly of two political parties who spend all their time bickering and scheming to get more power because they've decided politics is a football game where the goal is to score more than the other team and not a civic duty to run the country for the benefit of the people.
Bread, milk, butter, etc the farthest away from the entrance so you can't just go in and out.
This one works fine when you scroll the wheel, but when you use middle click and drag to scroll i just moves one single step.
Also, people's previous history. If you don't buy crap don't show it high in the results.
And, intent. are they really searching for a new product or just using search to find the product/brand they want
Why do you think they don't? This is exactly the sort of thing I would expect Amazon to get right.
> Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.
What do you do when a product serves two customers (shoppers and advertisers?)
> Is it? Newspapers aren’t exactly thriving and it’s not because of Amazon.
Would you have a problem if a random local newspaper company had significant influence over what 50% of the U.S. bought, watched, read, listened to, ate, and needed for medical purposes in addition to market power that made it stay that way?
I am not sure people are really prepared to take the implication of how unfair Amazon seems to its logical conclusion, because it means undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism. Regulation targeted at increasing competition (breakups, rather than regulation Amazon as a monopoly of a kind and entrenching them) might result in a better outcome, or it just might make things more expensive and then you have to repeat the same breakup and regulation process again every 15 years.
I read Wealth of Nations, did I miss the part where it says:
"you should have a single global company control most of the market"?
Every economist writes about importance of competition.
If you want to keep around giant monopolies, you are not capitalist.
It also comes across as "two wrongs make a right"
What's more, if you tell amazon "no more retail ads", surely they can just do what normal stores do, and charge a slotting fee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee) instead.
If right now the first 10 results on amazon.com for "mattress" are all ads because those companies paid $1000 to be advertised first, how is that meaningfully different from amazon only carrying 10 mattresses at all, and instead of charging ad fees, charging a $1000 slotting fee to the mattress companies?
I am not particularly arguing for or against anything, just speculating that breaking it up would, in practice, be hard. Perhaps some other regulatory action would work better.
Also, many breakup scenarios for Amazon involve spinning out the fulfillment business. Who cares if Amazon.com stocks 10 mattresses if I can just build a competitor stocking 10,000 while using the same infrastructure.
Facebook in particular given that their erroneous metrics literally put several media companies out of business. Not only did they charge for nonexistent engagement, but the BS engagement numbers they were providing were so enticing that it created a huge push towards expensive-to-create video content.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
Thats what conflict of onterest means
Amazon sells ads on its marketplace. It also sells ads that integrate within its marketplace listings in a fashion that can be difficult to discern. It offers a fulfillment service that is integrated with its marketplace. It offers an integrated third party marketplace. These, are of course, facts. Whereas my initial response to was just the hypothetical point that you misunderstand how anti-trust law is applied. I don't think this has been much of a conversation seeing as how you are just being purposefully obtuse. It's clear you are making no efforts to come at this with good faith and I'm not going to bother any further otherwise.
You can use outrage if you want, but the fact remains that Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly, not in the legal sense and not in any layperson sense.
You’re kind of proving my point for me, that there’s no actual argument here, just general negative sentiment.
I just happen to live in AR and know a number of people who work on the relevant teams that do each of these things at Walmart, and given Walmart.com's growth in the last year, Amazon is far from the only company able to provide these services profitably.
Is Amazon a competitor? Yes. Do they have a monopoly? Heck no.
What is the play here? Should Amazon focus on quality goods from quality suppliers in order to rebuild brand trust?
The "free delivery" minimums are pretty easy to hit at some place like Walmart or Target or Home Depot, and often it's just free shipping period.
And since 2day shipping is dead at Amazon even with prime, you just start cart-collecting and ship when it hits the amount.
Or you pay shipping to places like Monoprice, rather do that than pay amazon "more" for the "same thing (literally)" with free shipping.
i never buy these products because u know its a scam of 800% margin. there are no products anymore that are decent priced. it all like thai taxi mafia
But the second half of that story - the reason it led to me blacklisting Amazon belongs here:
A day or two after installing the Echo Dot, I wrote a very personal and long postponed email to my sister. We haven't communicated much in years. But COVID ended our mother's life, and ultimately lead to me having a heart attack and being diagnosed with a genetic condition. I wanted to pick up on something she said about memories of the house we shared growing up. I mentioned, in brief, the table tennis set up, and the bright red, multi-layered, over engineered table tennis bat I was bought as a youngster. I wanted to note that it was more expensive than those of my two elder siblings - and I didn't really know why that was the case. I was gently making a concession about the dynamics of our family and how maybe they said something about us as people - fourty years later. - as sensitively as I could, in the face of estrangement, mental health issues for both of us, family tragedy, the march of time on our bodies.
The next time I logged into Amazon - I was confronted by page after page of adverts for over engineered bright red table tennis bats.
End of relationship with Amazon.
I rarely use hotmail for personal emails, so maybe that was how the information leaked. But I doubt that. I think it was about that Echo dot sitting their verifying my identity as an amazon customer.
Amazon getting 'people' so wrong is - for me - just one of many signs that the FAANG's business model of the last 15, 20 years - is utterly doomed. Anyone thinking that opportunities to do better aren't staring the rest of us in the face, needs to wake up, and realise they maybe insects, in economic terms, but they're living on dinosaurs. Don't allow yourself to be decieved into thinking your current "host" is the only one that could ever provide you with an environment to survive, or thrive. The West seemingly will not allow anything resembling a meteor strike. Rather it would delay and absorp any change over as long a period as possible. I tend to believe that we're actually doing what people in history have always done, when they end up looking very silly and naive: succumbing heavily to recency bias. Evolution and History will eventually have it's way.
Human identities and the makings of relationships are not the shallow constructs we have learned to consider them as. A flag and a brand do not show you what is inside. Convenience is forgettable if there is something more personal at stake, any half-decent alternative will do. It's the organisations who know what that means who will come good. I can't help but think, in a quasi-manic hyperconnected way, that this ties in very neatly with what "AI" is going to give us, how it is best considered. And also the need for verified identities.
From the moment the web arrived, I prized anonymity, and never paid a subscription. Twenty years later - I see the limits of that approach as fundamental to why the web has turned out to be such a terrible, traumatic, unsatisfying experience. In that one instance, it was clear to me, that they'll steal your identity and tell you what it means to be you. What you can have, as well as what turns you on.
Hence I am actually excited about a future where I can demonstrate my identity as my "property", harness that in ways that will satisfy me. And that will include paying for services that work better for me.
It is legitimately criminal.