Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page.

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.

View on HN

> 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?

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.

I worked at a Kroger in high school and I learned this fact then. A lady was assembling a big display for s’mores supplies (Hershey’s, Reese’s, brand name marshmallows, and some graham crackers). They paid for a premium spot in the store right next to the checkout lanes since it was near Fourth of July and they wanted to maximize sales.

Even the placement on store shelves is paid for. The prime shelf space costs more than the bottom shelf, for example.

it’s more intricate than this. There is store shelf specific plans to define how inventory should be stocked at the SKU level on a given shelf. The distance between the price tags determine the actual shelf space facings usually, in addition to end-caps, which are very premium spaces.

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.

> This is a new low.

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.

And "fulfilled by Amazon" or even a product shipped without Amazon's involvement at all comes from supermarkets. In the chips and snacks aisle, that section full of Frito-Lay products or soft drinks (come to think of it, Pepsi owns Frito-Lay): the store rents our a section of the aisle and it's managed by the manufacturer: their truck shows up and the truck driver restocks that section of the shelving, rearranges the product, etc.

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.

I knew a guy (older, old school generation) who's one among other responsibilities was to go store-to-store and bring the end cap materials. In addition he would spot check that the end cap displays their company paid for were in fact being placed.

Ads on the store search is more like you ask a clerk to help you find one thing and they show you three other things first.

The clerk can preferentially show you higher margin products that might be what you're looking for, and while a grocery store wouldn't bother other retail (ex: electronics, cars) will.

I’ve actually heard of many restaurants doing this as well.

“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.

Everything is amplified since the physical space on a screen is much smaller than the field of vision in a store. The real estate on phone is basically 2 products or 4 on laptop at a time for everything. This makes the ads wayyyy more powerful-not to mention targeted-than shelf placement or end caps or whatever else.

Also:

- can pay for having product on higher shelves - can pay for more “facing” (width) on the shelf - packaging is itself a kind of ad

Pretty much every banking app I've used in recent memory (Chase, Citi, AmEx) has some kind of ad in it. Either to promote the bank's services, or promoting partnership deals (extra points for spending at certain retailers; discounts if you add a retailer's deal to what is basically a virtual coupon book). They're not quite as intrusive at Amazon's search result ads, but they're there.

I just don’t use banking apps. If a bank doesn’t have a fully-featured website for me to use with a desktop browser, I won’t use that bank.

You know you can pay eBay to promote your listing. That is pretty much what they mean by ads in this case. Someone is paying to be the top spot or be promoted on search results.

I think Amazon has an ad network of sorts, so sellers bid for the sponsored search slot. In retailers who don't have such a platform, merchandisers take the call and boost/bury products in search results.

Ahh, that makes sense. It also explains why I see certain sellers ads everywhere from time to time.

Ads on Amazon are far more annoying than ads on other web properties, because I go to Amazon for a very specific need. I search for Tide washing liquid and I see these sponsored products on top, way above the Tide result. From a purist viewpoint, this is disgusting. I have to come to you Amazon, to just give me what I want, not what you think I want.

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.

> 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.

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.

Sadly neither of these are allowed to sell in India. It's an Amazon/Flipkart duopoly and I personally cannot stand the Flipkart shopping interface. Millions love it.

Sorry, I assumed you were in the US!

> I have to come to you Amazon, to just give me what I want, not what you think I want.

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.

> just give me what I want, not what you think I want.

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?

Ads revenue.

To be fair, from a purist viewpoint everything is disgusting.

I don’t recall whether it’s been within the app or the website but my bank has definitely shown me ads - ads for a credit card with their brand or opening a money market account. I doubt it’s that unusual for a bank to advertise like that. On the other hand, if they started showing Taboola-esque, “one weird trick” trash my opinion of them would really plummet.

I think as long a bank is just advertising their services similar to how they do in a bank branch I don't really have a problem with it tbh.

PNC has ads for special offers in their banking app.

> What's next, ads on banking apps?

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.

You know products labeled as Amazon's choice? Those are actually ads. Search for a product by a specific manufacturer and see that first in the results is a (usually) similar product from a different manufacturer? An ad.

They also use their customer data to sell ads off the Amazon site.

This is wrong. You can't pay for those labels; Amazon auto-assigns them based on sales data.

Source: I sell on Amazon and one of my products is Amazon's choice for something.

Imagine having ads in your store for the products that you sell. Disgusting.

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.

When you go to a grocery store, manufacturers have paid money for specific locations in the store to draw your attention to their product. This is everywhere. Advertising is not something that only free services turn to in order to make money. It is something that everybody turns to in order to make money because they've got a platform for advertisement.

> Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads

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.

They auction the search result space, like Google search. I guess for prime members it would be nice to have the option to turn off. I have noticed this happening on lots of websites now, particularly grocery websites.

> What's next, ads on banking apps

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.

Re: banks, you can find the ads under "___ offers".[1] Ditto any "special" partnership they have, e.g., TrueCar is a popular one right now.

[1]: https://thepointsguy.com/credit-cards/credit-card-merchant-o...

>What's next, ads on banking apps?

Those definitely exist if you count ads from the bank itself (eg. upsells)

I already have ads for crappy financial products in my banking app.

Ads play the biggest part in why the Internet is mostly free. You know, companies need to make money somehow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com