I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this:
1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an ad for a competitor at higher priority than the actual result.
2. Fraud. If I search for a product that Amazon sells and Amazon shows me an ad for a different product first and hides the product I searched for below the fold, they are effectively telling me that they don’t have the product I searched for and possibly that it doesn’t exist. It seems to me that this is deceiving me for commercial gain.
3. Fraud again. If I search for a specific book and Amazon shows me an ad for that book, I think they’re trying to trick me into clicking that ad so they get extra revenue even if I don’t intend to click an ad. (And they’ve defrauded the ad buyer too. Those clicks are bogus. Seth Godin should not be charged for a click when the clicker was searching for the book by a good approximation of its name!)
Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions :)
This guy's publisher is paying Amazon $1/click to show the book to people who are already going to buy the book. It's basically the same thing.
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“
But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.
It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.
Oh, and you have to pay the building owner for the coupons which also discount your food.
> Advertising as inference not influence.
People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".
You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.
His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.
To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...
If you can, use Apple maps for now, although Apple has proudly proclaimed that they will be serving ads in maps soon. I also refuse to use the maps.app.goo.gl short links that google maps always wants to send. They will trap you in the compromised google search ecosystem. Insist on using raw addresses. I will paste in the raw address every time someone in a group chat sends a goo.gl link.
2 is just being bad at business. Which is why I’m skeptical it happens.
3, I hate to break it to you, basically happens in every major store you walk into in America. Google “slotting fees.” If you think customers want an alternative, apply to YC!
[1] The FTC (on your behalf) sued 1-800 contacts for trying this. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/08/...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/warby-parker-fends-...
Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/amazon-reinstates-b...
The day someone can sue me because they searched for something on my web site and what they expected didn't come up, my web site is effectively legally prevented from having a search box.
The action needed here is anti-trust style / monopoly action. If there were viable competitors it wouldn't matter what Amazon's search box does. The fact the US government is in denial about the whole principle of the need for robust anti-trust / competition enforcement that is the core issue here.
The anti-trust cases I am familiar with spanned decades. Perhaps it's not a representative sample, yet it also makes sense. Anti-trust basically says they're doing something that is normally legal, but they're abusing their power over the market in a way that makes those actions illegal. You're moving from prosecuting actions to intent. That is a whole lot more difficult to prove.
I'm also uncertain how I feel about prosecuting a company just because it is a monopoly. I absolutely hate monopolies, and large monopolies almost certainly got to where they were by illegitimate means. On the other hand, it is difficult to untangle legitimate consumer choice from a monopoly manipulating the market to remove that choice.
Hopefully Seth's publisher knows this?
2. Fraud is a stretch, these things are labelled even if it’s deliberately designed to be difficult to understand. The discovery on this would be fascinating though because I can guarantee you there’s records somewhere of a ticket to make things more deceptive…
3. I don’t think the fraud thing will get you the results you want (I guess this is a slightly ironic statement given what we’re talking about). According to Claude it’s more likely deception under “FTC Act §5” but you can’t directly do this anymore and apparently “Amazon reinstated binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver in its Conditions of Use, effective 14 August 2026.” So even taking them to court got much much more difficult.
I think unfortunately until a different administration (maybe one less motivated by billionaire donors) comes in, we are stuck with this type of practice.
worked in advertisement, and there's legal precedent to allow bidding on competitor brands (for every advertising network joy).
I just wanted to share that I find Seth's daily blog consistently excellent.
AI can mirror this style of writing, but it can't mirror the clarity of thought behind it.
> There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all.
How so? Amazon search is almost probably worse than 10 years ago.
If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.
The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).
This needs to be pinned as the top comment. Thank you!
An economist would not read past this first sentence.
Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality.
As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenient, fast delivery, easy returns and all that. But if you forego that convenience, there is usually a cheaper option: local shops, Chinese platforms, direct sales, etc...
The only thing is that Amazon is more diversified than other retailers, in particular, they have AWS, essentially selling the platform that runs their website to third parties. It makes sense for them to offer sell their ad service to third parties too.
B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.
Ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, even your physical Walmart store is also selling a lot of shelf space to manufacturers/advertisers (similar to how Amazon sell the first slot, or at this point first 'page'), especially those checkout lines (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-grocers-wring-extra-cash-ou...). That's why your on-boots retail staff can't change those planograms (which defines how to layout shelf space in a grocery store) willy-nilly, they're designed by the highest bidder. That's why those soda or chips seems placed in too convenient slots that are also 'coincidental' to those currently advertised in other ways, because it's, plain and simply, paid to be there.
To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.
In many ways this is symptomatic of larger trends in society and managerial culture of looking for ways to measure things rather than confronting the messy subjective non-measurable reality.
The only time we'll get a true counterfactual is when a competitor arises who can meet Amazon's very high bar for logistic excellence but can offer a more appealing interaction, and then Amazon retail will die off without anyone understanding how or why it happened.
But I'm close. My purchases through them are down probably somewhere around 80%. My girlfriend never really used Amazon and doesn't see the appeal at all - telling someone "it used to be good" makes you wonder what you're doing.
Even AWS has burned me and clients enough times that we pretty much don't use them anymore - an idea that was unthinkable a decade ago.
The other thing is that the more they burn this goodwill the more they'll be tempted to increase ad revenue, and the more the goodwill will disappear.
> As for Amazon, it is not cheap!
Not, however, reliable. Ordered espresso filters, got counterfeits; ordered new monitor, got used, with a scratch in the screen, followed by a runaround game while demanding a replacement.
It has everything to do with amazon.
Amazon has chosen to embed ads into the navigation used to shop on their site. It is a conflict with the customer's needs in just about every way possible.
I think the only time I saw something so blatant was years ago at the Cheesecake factory, where they had ads in their menu (not really food-related)
It doesn't have to be that way. Can you keep your search results pure and put ads next to them. If the ads are good, customers will be interested.
Yes, you will have fewer clicks (i.e. less ad revenue) than if you try to deceive your customers by not clearly marking ads. But you don't have to enshittify your page. Enshittification also lowers the value of your business, particularly in the long term.
First, no. You have missed the point of the piece entirely.
Second, even if you were right, is that an argument for it working that way? If this were a blog post about how gangrene sucks, would you be making the same case?
I’m just going to keep doing this like once a month here forever: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of its quality? How would I break through, if not ads?
To be clear I'm not letting Amazon entirely off the hook here, but Seth's situation is somewhat unique in that "someone looking for a particular book" seems to me like a really different use case than "I want an air fryer".
And "Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive" falls a little flat when a main reason for shopping on Amazon is that their prices tend to be really good.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
You wouldn't, your product would languish in obscurity and unless the searcher knew the exact actual product name forever be on page 200 of the search results (As a Sci-Fi book author I found this out the hard way). Influencers and having followers can also help your product break through, but that's about it. Self promotion of your product is usually actively discouraged or banned by many forums.
Make YouTube videos. Food porn is a thing, and some subset of that crowd will want to watch you fry stuff with your "pro" fryer.
It is a bandaid for a dysfunctional market with high transaction costs of trust(reputation) and triangulation(discovery).
Amazon only excells at low transfer cost - no negotiation and cheap delivery
They do the reviews themselves, watch for returns and quality issues, and can actually provide consumers with the best products.
> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse.
This is only true in extremely simply scenarios. In reality, most of the time individual consumers may prefer something other than "the highest ranked item in this category." Maybe another company has a feature that increases cost but adds utility, maybe there's a brand you trust more that makes a slightly less popular version, etc.
The problems of parasitic advertising still exist. People still see ads for products they will like less than the top rated search, but it's wrong to imagine that Amazon actually knows what that person would like best. If matching people to products was that easy you'd have all kinds of 3rd party recommendation services making very specific recommendations to make money off affiliate links. Instead we have a million "top 10" sites that work about as well as picking the #1 seller in an amazon category: not that well.
He seems to assume that there is 1 air fryer that everyone on Earth should be getting, and all others are strictly inferior. There are probably no products that exists where that logic is true. There is so much variation in cost vs quality, or entire feature-sets like you pointed out.
This bleeds over into incredibly "messy" areas too, like societal signaling. Someone might specifically want a more expensive version of something simply because it's more expensive. The author doesn't seem to account for any of this complexity, even the "simple" complexity of cost/quality/features.
The value that these types of ads can add is that Amazon can build up models that can "learn" and get better at matching every unique persons criteria and provide a way for vendors to get "matched" with that buyer. Obviously you can still critique this model, but to assume it's strictly bad feels like it lacks nuance/critical thinking.
But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.
Engaging with the nuance means engaging with the fact that rent-seeking can only exist where value (real or perceived) actually exists. Amazon is only able to sell these ads because sellers get value out of them through increasing sales using the infrastructure that Amazon built. The fact that they capitalize on that by creating a market for those ad-buyers to compete in (rent-seeking, as you'd call it) is not remotely surprising, they should be able to profit using the systems they built up. This is akin to paying more to rent a "better" booth to sell at at a trading card convention; or for ads costing more during the Superbowl halftime than at 2am on local news. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of that.
As far as a conflict of interest, Amazon is still incentivized to get a potential customer to make a purchase, and (more importantly) to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If Amazon develops a reputation of giving suggestions for junk products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon. It's "naturally" regulated in that way. Gibing some governing body the power to regulate what companies are/aren't allowed to suggest to their customers feels like it's only relevant if this was a true monopoly.
Re: monopolies- Amazon is not hiding alternative products to those in the ads; customers are people with the autonomy to find the product that best suites their needs, and they still have full capability of doing that. There are also plenty of other ways to purchase products, I'd guess that 95%+ of products available on Amazon can be sold/purchased elsewhere, it's just that Amazon is the most convenient way (for both buyers and sellers).
One thing that is structurally certain though: Amazon and other major corporations have almost unlimited time and direct incentives to find reasons to justify this point of view, while the people whose interests are being potentially being harmed (all Amazon customers) don't have much concentrated resources or focused, actionable incentives at the individual actor level to put together the counter case. I think it's incredibly important keep this asymmetry in mind before dismissing a take like Godin's in favor of Amazon friendly talking points.
I'm not here just to defend Amazon, it has it's issues, but it has also provided a lot of value to it's customers, all things considered (building out the largest most efficient supply/distribution chain ever, increasing convenience, reducing cost, and giving access to wide range of product choices). I just think it's important to take full stock of what the benefits are as well as to understand if harms are actually harms or just assumed harms. Basically, just to understand what the tradeoffs are, and that there's likely something positive to be found. I try to apply this thinking to more than just Amazon- like I said, I'm not here just to defend it.
Thanks again for the levelheaded response, I'll leave this feeling like I understand the point you were making better.
This also lines up a lot better with other complaints with amazon: their inability to get rid of counterfeit sellers, the degree to which their reviews (and listings) are gamed, etc. Arguably the reason people buy garbage on Amazon has more to do with their lack of interest in policing misbehavior than ads (though perhaps the ads are the financial incentive to keep being lazy).
You can see this with the knockoff[1] plugin that flags "no-name" brands on amazon. Sometimes this takes out the listings you want and you need to consider it, but I think it's a pretty effective counter to the kinds of scammy ads this poster is frustrated with.
OK, but the customer is the only person who gets to decide what that means. "Reversing the idea" is just making the same (imo faulty) assumption that the author is, which is that there is some known "good value" product that everyone should be buying. What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else.
If anything, allowing for ads like Amazon does is probably more likely to match a customer to the product that's "good value" for them. If someone consistently buys products after sorting price low>high, then you know something about their purchasing habits - giving them a recommendation to buy a $450 air fryer because it's "good value" (decided by who?) isn't helpful when they really just want something barebones for $100.
Like, are you suggesting that when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs? That doesn't seem very likely to me.
So nothing I said disagrees with this. I agree that "pseudo-scam" products and counterfeits exist on Amazon, but if something is risky/dangerous for someone to buy, Amazon is at least partially liable for this - I got a product recall from Amazon for a water kettle (that Amazon doesn't make) that had some defect that could lead to scalding.
While it's a problem, Amazon is incentivized to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If they develop a reputation of giving suggestions for junk/scam/counterfeit products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon - at both the individual, and word of mouth levels. Your concern is "naturally" regulated in that way. Amazon wants to keep it's customers happy so it can keep selling them things, and selling them crap is a bad way to keep them happy.
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> when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs
What did I say that would imply this? No, I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that some people want to pay less ($100 vs $450) for a cheaper product (barebones version) and that's what represents good value to them - not something at the same price that's fake, I really don't know where you think I implied that lol.
> I really don't know where you think I implied that
When you said "What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else." you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value. I articulated that idea to an absurd degree in suggesting that you were saying some people would be happy to be scammed - which might be true if good value is impossible to understand objectively.
The main point I'm trying to make there is that customers are unpredictable (and irrational) and they have autonomy, and they need to bear at least some responsibility in making sure what they are buying meets their needs/wants, regardless of what Amazon was paid to suggest to them. This is true everywhere, like at a grocery store - it would be a silly article if it complained about more expensive or store-brand products being placed at eye-level when a "better deal" might be 3 shelves down. That's essentially what Amazon is doing and what the complaint is.
> you implied that there was no knowable standard for good value
This is something I stand by (see above), but you would have to take it to an absurd extreme to conclude that it means I think people are happy being scammed.
Being scammed on Amazon a separate problem, with other avenues of recourse (filing complaints directly to Amazon/requesting refunds, legal system for counterfeits or misleading advertising, etc.), and Amazon is financially incentivized to avoid it to keep customers happy/returning.
The solution to this is just what you described, a 3rd-party recommendation service. I don't think there's any reason Amazon should be able to make better recommendations than I can with a minute or two of research. Advertising giants only have a marketing profile on people, I think it's fairly limited in terms of how helpful it can be.
The problem with the "top 10" sites you mention is ironically that they are almost all actually advertisement sites, not genuine product recommendation sites. This means they get paid to place products and are essentially corrupt. I would guess the ecosystem is so universally horrible is because SEO costs money and requires them to aggressively monetize to exist. I've read that the Wirecutter is one of the only genuine sites and I find that it usually works fairly well at the price bracket they choose and for certain kinds of home goods.
Let's use a Google Example: I search for Toyota RAV4 and get an ad for Mazda cx-50. Obviously Toyota hates that but as a consumer it has a chance of making me aware of something I didn't know but would want to know, especially as a part of a purchase decision. That's why Mazda pays for that ad slot, and also why Toyota makes it expensive for them :)
Obviously google in this scenario comes out ahead and it is annoying for some users but can be highly valuable if done well.
It's not how I search or shop but plenty of people do.
The number of times I have searched something, got back something I did not ask for, and found that helpful, rounds down to zero. It's actively destructive to the platforms that allow this kind of hijacking of search terms.
I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion
Literally everyone I know feels this way, even if they don't care about it as passionately. No one "appreciates" being openly manipulated to their financial detriment.
It would only perform well if you identified some actual source of latent demand. For example, maybe many people searching for Taylor Swift concert tickets would actually be happy with movie tickets to see a simulcast. At which point, you are providing real information to some searchers.
We can debate and disagree about whether this is something you want in your search results, but it’s not spam. Spam exists because it doesn’t have to compete in an auction.
If I search for specific terms then I get a menu of slop to choose from. Search isn't built to serve the searcher at all. Search is meant to surface things that are promoted, hyped, advertised, or paid for in some way.
So you search Amazon for stuff and a lot of crap added on to it. Any retail site's filters are useless for filtering out what you don't want to see or casting a net for desirable features. I swear--search for "bananas" at a grocery store and you'll get results for ice cream and baby food and Minions merchandise and organic pears?
This behavior has already crept into LLM responses. I often request that they compile a list of the top-5 or top-10 according to some criteria. And it never fails that they cannot resist giving me outliers and things that don't fit by any means. Now I don't know what influences an LLM to give stupid non-matching results, but I know they do. Is RLHF already baking-in advertising and sponsorship? I wouldn't rule it out.
Case in point: the other day I was thinking of Amy Schumer but couldn't remember her name. So I struck up a convo with Copilot, and described Schumer by profession, personality, and physical attributes. Copilot first suggested a slender Black woman. Then Diablo Cody. And eventually compiled me a list of 5-7 people who were nothing like Amy Schumer. Never once even thought to mention her. Once I surfaced her name by other means, I went back and scolded Copilot, just so I could feel smug and better about myself. But it's genuinely surreal.
I am always surprised that people apparently think corporations want the best for their customers. They want the best for their shareholders. Sometimes the latter overlaps with the former, but mostly that's not the case.
There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and housing assistance, but I'd be willing to bet that amazon would make back some of it in increased amazon purchases too. It'd be great if the government cracked down on corporations who use taxpayer money to subsidize their labor expenses
If "not paying someone x dollars" = force, then at this moment, I'm forcing 6 billion people to do something.
Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy.
Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video ..
There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it..
We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.
Some of the products aren't that bad (most are at least better than these sorts of results would spit out when it first started, years ago), but the prices are also at the same not-too-cheap, not pricey moderate price-point as the (of course I know many of those brands are not American but I know how they fit) known brands. Whoever is coding language parsing at Amazon.com must be really challenged by the brands; I get that; but there has to be a way to make it less stressful to shop. Maybe Bezos is just secretly trying to get us all to buy clothes where we don't buy food and books. Ha.
But yes, the language and sorting models being used by Amazon suck.
Unfortunately for them, I’d rather buy cheep Chinese crap from a local retailer where there is still a human buyer in the loop choosing something that’s not the lowest bottom of the barrel junk.
When I worked there a long time ago I spoke to the search team about moving more towards a New Egg style filtering model. When I’m looking for something there’s often very specific features I want. Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want. I’ve bought more than a few wrong things due to this. Returns must not factor into whatever fees they’re making off everything else.
If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.
I was looking for a device that plugs into my car's 12V cigarette lighter outlet, connects with my phone's Bluetooth, outputs the audio to 3.5mm aux (my car has aux input but no Bluetooth), has no battery, automatically turns on with my car, has next and previous track buttons, and outputs USB-C with at least 30W.
Amazon's search filters were useless for this, but their LLM was able to read through reviews and suggest products that come very close. Unfortunately, no exact product exists that fulfills all the requirements.
It may be better than the uselessness of the Amazon search box, but that's a very low bar.
Not exactly, they'll show you the items they want you to buy/are paid to promote. They don't actually think you want the crap their search surfaces, at most they think they can con you into buying that stuff anyway as long as they make it difficult or impossible for you to find what you're actually looking for.
As an example of how this stacks up, in the app, I filter air fryers to be red. Easy, right? One option, two sponsored, three more options, an autoplay video ad for a non-red one, then another sponsored link, “customers frequently viewed carousel with more sponsored links, one of which is not red, (so this is a full phone screen and a half with zero real results), one more result, two sponsored links, three more results, and then a non-red deep fryer, which is not even an air fryer to begin with. How does a silver deep fryer end up in these results at all?
The shittiness continues. A sponsored link to a toaster oven (not an air fryer either), another sponsored link, a real result, a used air fryer, silicone liners (not air fryers), a carousel of “trending now” including four of five items that are not air fryers either (and a low-rated red air fryer I haven’t seen yet… which makes me think they are outright lying about it being a ‘trending’ item), another carousel with “brands related to your search”, ALSO sponsored, two more results, another near full screen autopay video ad, three sponsored links for air fryer accessories, two real results for more accessories, then two more real red air fryer results, though one is only available used.
I’m exhausted just typing that out. It’s soul-crushing. A good two-thirds of total screen real estate in any given session is just pure ads. And I typed “red air fryer”, so don’t show me a red air fryer silicone liner! That’s not what I asked for. If you must, label it in a carousel that says “matching accessories, that’s both user friendly and appropriate!
You can make it slightly more useful by changing the sort order to average rating or best selling, but for many "normie" things the bestselling will just be the crap amazon shows people by default.
I know the item is there because Google returns it, either as a search response or in their "shopping" widget. I can click through Google to Amazon and see the item, sometimes even from the certified seller. But if I enter the exact search term in Amazon's search bar it doesn't show up in their own results.
This reminds me of Instagram's search page, which is full of animated videos jumping at you to dissuade you from completing the search you wanted and just click on what they want you to see.
The last big redesign netflix made was pretty much universally hated, but they were mostly upfront about the fact that it was intended to take choice away from users and highlight the shows they wanted to promote. For a company that got where they are because people wanted "on demand" over cable TV it seems strange to hear them now saying "Choosing for yourself is so hard! Just let us tell you what to watch!" but that's the attitude every company seems to be taking.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.
It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.
Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.
“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.
Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.
As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.
Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.
Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.
Came by a bookstore yesterday, went in, asked the nice lady, she recommend 3, one was a pretty good match, bought it on the spot.
It’s so easy to get lost online when you’re looking for something these days…
To do this in brick-and-mortar, you'd have to use remotely programmable price tags and detect who is looking at what, which seems doable, but then you still run into all kinds of tough questions with no good answers. If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register? And did a legal sale even occur if I wasn't aware what I would be paying? I don't think it's going to work.
If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.
Though mostly, the discounts I use are already posted on the shelf, I just need to "clip" an e-coupon in the app to get it.
They do send me emails and even postal mails with coupons too, but those all go in the trash.
I never get coupons for what I actually buy, I only get coupons for things I don't buy. Those things are sometimes related, but if I wanted the other brand, I'd already be buying the other brand.
The local supermarket chain near me has more or less done away with normal low prices on the shelves. If you want anything resembling a deal, you get to deal with their shit-tier quality app plus other friction inducting time wasting crap like "clipping" digital coupons. Plus opting in to all the associated tracking the app does in order to use it.
They effective raised prices 10-20% for the entire store and then the only way to get a deal is use the app. This is only currently slight hyperbole - every month it rolls out more and more in this direction.
This way they can tell regulators "we only give discounts in a discriminatory manner! We don't raise prices!" when the time comes.
With any luck a judge will see right through that unmitigated bullshit, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I refused to get their card and stopped shopping there.
Don't expect discounts on what you buy often. They know they have you hooked on those already and they'll drive up the price on those items (for you) the minute they can. They'll give discounts on brands you don't buy to entice you to switch (if those other brands pay them enough to do it). These surveillance pricing systems are not for your benefit. They aren't there to save you money. They only exist to take more of your money away from you.
They've known for a long time now that their profits will go through the roof if they can get away with it, but the fact that consumers find the practice offensive has held them back along with the cost of initial investments in things like digital price tags and facial recognition systems (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/s41272-019-002...) but all of it is coming. The big chains have already started. By the end of this year Walmart should have digital price tags in every store. Facial recognition is spreading too (often using loss prevention as an excuse). The grocery chain Kroger announced they'll be using facial recognition to offer different prices to different people. Their digital price tags scan faces, and your track appearance and behaviors, like how long you spend looking at various products.
It'll be simple for stores to do things like charge people more when their cameras see them wearing expensive clothes, or when the data collected from their app shows that they live in rich neighborhoods or when they can use the data they collect on you in combination with information from data brokers to learn what your income level is. I fully expect things to get even weirder like stores setting higher prices for people with the wrong opinions or political views. Algorithms will be caught "accidentally" discriminating on things like skin color and gender.
There's a little bit of pushing back against that kind of things in some places, but with the massive amounts of money on the table I expect that politicians will be bribed to allow it.
> If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register?
The store shelves have cameras in them. You won't see your price until the system detects you. They can even display your photo/avatar next to the price so you know that it's for you. Facial ID at the register tells them who you are when it's time to pay up. That's just for now though. Eventually it'll likely all happen in a cell phone app and you won't be able to as easily look over someone else's shoulder to see what price they're paying.
The function is to get incremental sales (and hopefully establish a pattern of repeat business) by discounting selectively to people who might not buy at all otherwise.
If you're thinking "But they should give that discount to everybody!" that's not a thing. There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
My grocery store already sends me individualized paper coupons every month.
All of this is promotions. It's all just trying to get some incremental sales, and hoping that if you get an offer for free hot dog buns you'll also buy the hotdogs.
Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".
But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you: - possess one of a range of sanctioned devices - have access to data services - are able to create and manage an account - are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry - can claim the "deal" in advance
Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.
I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.
Strange how this totally worked until a few years ago. I never cut coupons or any other time wasting shenanigans, but was able to stop up on deals on the commonly used shelf-stable items I buy without even needing to signup to a loyalty program.
I understand price segmentation is a thing. But it's gotten pretty exhausting and only increasingly so.
Fast food you can simply opt out of. My health improved due to them shifting all the "deals" to the app, and doubling menu prices. Groceries are a different thing.
This isn't even a little hypothetical- bluetooth had to anonomyze the MAC address to stop this, and it still fails sometimes.
https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/business/jetblue-x-post-sparks...
I also think this hypothetical "scan to see your price" scenario is a lot worse. As things stand now, there's still a baseline price. If the shelf says $8.99 then you know that you may be able to get a better price through their loyalty program or with a coupon, but it will never be more than $8.99. In a fully dynamic pricing world where you have to scan scan to get a number at all, which is what a lot of businesses would really love to have, you'd lose that baseline. That item might ring up at $20 if the system decides I'm desperate or inattentive or just don't care. This is already possible online, of course. If it spreads to grocery stores, though, I'm going to start channelling Ned Ludd and it won't be pretty.
People only look at recommendations now, they don't look with their eyes anymore.
So now restaurants have to focus on growth hacking rather than food quality.
That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".
Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.
I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.
source: my parents were in the restaurant business
Keeping a restaurant open is more about managing costs than having good food; many die because of not great inventory and supply chain handling, for example.
I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.
There’s a perception that those who seek knowledge and truth are somehow less happy. Ignorance, and the willingness to take the path of least resistance, can be seen as an advantage for those who would rather not look too closely. Fundamentally, perhaps the difference comes down to red pill versus blue pill, and the illusions we’re willing to accept.
What I often see, especially in the social media era, is people who are selectively curious and like to notice negative things. So they'll share lots of articles with titles like "The Amazon Tax", which I agree was interesting and informative, but they're not at all interested in e.g. "How Amazon Is Bringing Fast Delivery to Rural America" (https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/how-amazon-is-bringin...). That's more of a problem, and I think it's what drives the idea that truth-seekers are less happy.
1. We tend to believe "more power/knowledge/choices" is universally a good thing; that we are rational creatures in some sort of game theoretic landscape where we are free to optimize for our own outcomes, and extra options or information can only be to our optimization benefit.
2. We tend to believe that as moral agents, we have obligations to Good. More specifically, knowingly choosing against Good should in proportion produce Guilt.
The bind that results from (1)+(2) is distinctly Christian to me, obsessed as Christianity is with the notion of shame as a moral whip. It is an exercise in religionmaking how to structure one's psychological incentives so that solipsism is avoided while not sacrificing (1).
Are you aware of the world you live in?
I would use it to question the premise
> we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide
which in reality I decided was obviously wrong the first time I heard it, many years ago. In fact, I don't think this concept of "complicity" is morally valid at all.
Certainly this world comprises many other things than the Holocaust and IBM's support of it. Perhaps your awareness is lacking if you think that is the main thing to be aware of in this world.
I don't think that's what GP was saying at all.
To me "Are you aware of the world you live in?" suggests "If you don't even know this, you don't know anything. This is the first thing anyone should know". I'm willing to learng if they meant something else, but I guess that's asking a lot.
This was, to my thinking, such a straightforward interpretation that it didn't bear making explicit; and your interpretation genuinely didn't even occur to me.
I did nothing of the sort.
I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.
The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's a semantic distinction without a difference.
> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.
a lot is worse now, but not shopping. on amazon some very specific items may be hard to find, and the search will throw a lot of crap at you, but you're still free to refine, compare and explore. finding exactly what you need and making an informed purchase has never been easier, and you get next day delivery (most of the time) plus exceptional return/refund policy and process. not sure about picking a, b or c? order all three, keep one, return the rest. i ofc don't (usually) do that, but i could. don't know how shopping could get any better/easier?
i don't like amazon as a company, it is evil and there is a lot to criticise, but the service and the value to the customer they provided has completely transformed shopping, for the better.
ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
We ended up not purchasing anything due to some unknowns, but when my PM told me we'd just order what we need I told him if the price is remotely the same we should go back to the store a few blocks away because had I not spent 15 minutes chatting I would have wasted hours reading blogs/ads trying to figure out what I needed.
Dude, nearly everytime I'm at a shop that's what happens. Not all are top top experts, but generally they have a very good idea about their subject and perform their jobs as if they liked them.
But that's Norway, not everyone is so lucky to live here.
Urgh... kills me.
I have some ebay alerts for items for one of my hobbies (nothing at all to do with cars). Sometimes if ebay has nothing that matches my alert, I still get an email with spare car parts that I can buy.
And today I was looking for specific brand of wine for a friend on a bottle shop's website. I got 108 results, none of which were for the brand I was searching for, many of which weren't even wine either.
It's been noticed, just not put into words very often. And it's not as if anyone felt like they could do anything about it.
Years ago Amazon intentionally nerfed their own on-site search into complete uselessness. A step at a time they removed the ability to exclude a term by prefixing a '-', then they removed grouping terms into a phrase either with quote marks or plus+signs. For years these all worked well. It's no longer plausible that the reason is to serve semantic search results, they could still include synonyms lower in results while respecting exclusion and phrases but that would make what's really going on too obvious.
The real reason they nerfed their search so bad I often have to use Google with "site:amazon.com" is simply so they can serve up whatever results are most profitable which vaguely semantically match any term. This is a big profit center due to all the 'marketing programs' they push on third-party sellers. Paying for these is virtually required to get on the first page of any popular search. Amazon has a huge inventory of such listings and selling you one of those listing is more profitable for Amazon, but assuming the price is the same, less profitable for the reseller due to giving Amazon even more of their slim margin. Since playing this game has become required, it raises the ASP of all products - another Amazon tax.
Through the Bezos era and up until around ten years ago, Amazon was "good", meaning their broad strategies and policies were generally a net gain for most buyers. Things Like allowing negative reviews and no-questions returns made me a fan and allowed Amazon to destroy all its competition. Since then they've gradually A/B tested their way into, IMHO, pure evil.
For consumers, the only real net gains Amazon still provides is massive inventory and faster delivery for Prime items (although you may have noticed they are now also strategically degrading Prime delivery consistency). Everything else about Amazon is objectively worse. Products are more expensive, search is intentionally broken, the site is rife with paid placements and dark patterns. And no one can compete because as soon as a new upstart offers search that works or lower prices by not forcing all sellers into high-margin programs, Amazon will un-nerf that specific enshittification just enough until the new threat is exterminated.
You don't need warehouses or delivery drivers - you can make it place an Amazon order to the customer's address through the customer's Amazon account. (All you have to do is ignore the fact that Amazon doesn't want you to ask for other people's Amazon passwords.)
Maybe I just learned it’s ways, but I feel like I was ~satisfied with AltaVista… I think Google came to eat their lunch in part because they took search way more seriously than DEC did.
My biggest frustration with google search is that it doesn’t. Keywords that I know are on millions of pages only return a handful of results.
I thought we basically had 110-130V North American voltage and 220-240V Euro and others voltage as the actual voltage you get from the grid varies within a range.
Some probably non-LLM explanations:
https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs
https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-...
You can't just will arbitrary part specifications into existence. You can't declare that you need a 67.53 ohm resistor and then search for that. They only make certain values.
I don’t think the forest is dark (obvious financial incentives) and I don’t think we’re pre-Google (as you said, you can literally still find what you want, USING GOOGLE, even)
However that has lead to a massive drop off in quality and price/value ratio of all products. Now the brands and the knock offs are in a race to the bottom for the lowest quality product/profit ratio so there truly is no difference and no quality products below "luxury" tier exist anymore.
Even some high'ish tier brands shoes like Hoka/Ons shoes have major quality issues even though they exist at just below the "premium" price point. I had two pairs of the same Ons last year, one lasted 3 months and started falling apart the other pair is still going 1y later. I wore them roughly the same amount switching between them. I looked up online and it turns out both brands avoid long term production contracts to bank profits from the lowest bidder at expense of their own brand they built.
Ironically I'd say that this was what firmly cemented the concept. Brands truly gained their power when they separated themselves from what they produce and the name providing it. Previously, brands were tied to the quality of their items. When they separated the idea, it enabled brands to become lifestyles and cultural signifiers, which skyrocketed the profitability of being a brand rather than a producer of a good.
I think many people noticed the change. However, when semantic search first came about, it was useful and not the only option. Being able to see items similar to my search term on Amazon was analogous to browsing products in the same aisle in a physical store, which was helpful when you wanted an item from a category but haven't decided on the exact one.
The enshittifying and infuriating difference now is that the choice of using semantic search have been taken away. It is often the only option, and the definition of things that are "semantic similar" is a mile wide. I appreciate semantic search when I have good use cases for it, but please give me the option to turn it off when I don't need it.
I’ve encountered “no results” on DuckDuckGo at least half a dozen times in the last couple of months when I know there should be relevant results, and Google gives me relevant results (sigh; I think I had gone for more than a year without using !g). Most of these have been exact keyword matches.
When I came to Canada almost 30 years ago, IT-job immigrants, let alone people who've grew up in this system were already doing 'buy real estate, rent it out, profit' and their day job was just a means to finance becoming a permanent rent seeker.
Pikachu surprise face that a culture that thinks rent seeking is great ends up doing it everywhere, all of the time, including Amazon.
Assuming they were any good at it. They can’t even figure out basic product design.
You cannot have the purchase funnels you describe without better UI/UX. Amazon’s is abysmal.
Very often people leave Amazon and boycott them entirely (like I do) because the experience is so awful across the board.
I don’t believe they are “guiding” anyone to anything. Amazon only became profitable after COVID when they forced everyone to shut down so we had to use Amazon. Everyone noticed that and remembers.
You put them on a pedestal.
Ever tried to login to AWS? Login. A regular login form. They can’t do it.
I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Ships from third party" schemes, this feels like a new low.
Paired with the article, it seems to me like the natural conclusion is that the company wants to move away from distribution and towards pure rent-seeking, in the most blatant ways possible, trying to squeeze as much cash as possible from their name while it has any value.
Hello! Another thing it means is that you are legally responsible for paying ... ta-dum ... TARIFFS!
Separately, I'd note that Amazon doesn't want high levels of returns (which it has to pay for in many cases), so they still try to herd people toward products that they will find acceptable. Might they not love them as much as some others? Perhaps, though this is a fine line to try to walk, and I'm not sure that Amazon is actually trying to walk it.
This is a solved problem. Recommendation algorithms aren't just "highest average rating", they take into account number of ratings, recent trends, etc.
Even if some ads improve this experience, Amazon is orders of magnitude past that threshold into hostility and toxicity. You have to scroll through pages of sponsored results to find anything worthwhile.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
So much agreement! I have a bunch of obscure parts like 99 wooden dowels from when I needed one and had to buy 100.
Screwfix is sometimes OK for this, but I still end up in situations like the above where I have 99 wooden dowels that will remain in my garage for all time.
(For what it's worth, I also completely agree with Amazon vs stores like John Lewis etc, I haven't bought anything from Amazon for years now, and definitely don't miss it at all)
So much nostalgia for these shops. A man with a posh, sparkling clean apron knowing exactly what you need or mean. In and out in under a minute or two having parted with just 30p
Screwfix are actually pretty close in terms of service. Their staff are pretty patient with people and quite helpful. They mostly only sell packs of things though (and wow fixings got expensive... anyway. And it's ironic that the "trades" brand of the group that owns B&Q has better customer service than B&Q...)
"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. But there is value to show some noise in the search long term.
Another way to look at it is through the vail of ignorance. Suppose you're a manufacturer of air fryers, but don't know where you stand in terms of how competitive or popular your product is. Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Sure if you're the top 3 manufacturer, maybe you would prefer not to pay the tax. But if you're not, you'd much rather prefer the system in which you can.
The incumbent has a massive advantage, making it harder for a new (but better) product to get on the first page.
Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rated one, at least until they get high ratings, and then can increase the price. If they're going to be losing money on marketing, it would be nicer if it goes to consumers.
Yes. I’d rather compete on quality and customer satisfaction than who can burn the most money on ads.
By making it almost necessary to buy their ads, Amazon is harming my margin.
I don’t hate all advertising, but I do hate this form, where it’s perverting search.
That's assuming two things -- user desires and valuation models are identical (they're not, even within a single product view)
and that the state of products is static -- Once a product is best there cannot be a new best in the future. You have to have buyers try new products, some of them disappointed, to plot the shape of what is best or worst. Charging companies a fee means they have to be really sure/serious that what they have to offer is market satisfying (else they're wasting their money).
What we really need is for consumers to stop being so short term thinking and buying the cheapest item (on BNPL no less) and for Amazon to be held accountable for how they penalize people who legitimately compete with them (imo an anti-trust issue).
They’re entitled? By whose standards are “best air fryer” to be determined? Do all buyers have the same criteria for what “best” means to them?
Over the years they largely improved the delivery time. Now if I am ordering a package before 4PM there is a high chance I will get it the next day in the morning. Prices however became higher and higher, at the point that for many products Amazon is not that convenient anymore: if you need home appliance (TV, dishwasher etc) other online or physical shops are now significantly cheaper. If you look sport equipment (e.g. climbing, mountain bike, hiking) the specialized shops are usually cheaper as long as you are OK to wait for longer delivery time and maybe combine 2 or more products to reduce the shipping costs.
I still find Amazon convenient during prime days and black Friday, and because of the large catalog with many alternatives and sometimes useful reviews (need a new shower head, a new mouse, a hole puncher, a tire for the bicycle...) but prices are not as good as they used to be. But if you need something in a hurry, the fact that you can order today and get it tomorrow is a big plus.
Oh sure, their search gives you the impression you can filter/sort but due to zero policing anyone can say whatever they want about their product and I have the feeling Amazon just sucks at this on top of the seller malice.
Just try to filter down to the dimensions you need, the connector you are looking for, the material you'd prefer and you'll be inundated with tons of items that share not resemblance to the filters you entered.
I only want X brand, here I hope you want to see results from Z, W, Q brands as well!
I only want items under 2ft wide, here are 4ft, 1ft, 6ft options!
I want only <1' cables, here are 12ft cables.
It's all a miserable experience. Often I skip the filters because if they are so bad at keeping out the trash then I worry I'll also lose legit options because I have zero trust in Amazon's ability to accurately filter.
I won't pretend running Amazon is easy but I'm constantly in shock at how absolutely terrible Amazon's website is to use. The number of UIs that are clearly optimized around data retrieval optimization instead of serving the customer is insane.
I do, you can too.
That ads are fine, it's not difficult to see what is labeled "sponsored".
What isn't fine is the hardcore gamification of reviews.
If reviews are fixed and you want to pay to advertise your 2-star hand mixer? Sure, but you are probably just paying to show off that you suck.
I do. I like money. Amazon doesn't seem to care when I report them.
And once the money clears my account, I change the review back. I have one on my desktop right now, awaiting a $50 gift card. I mean, I still care about people reading the reviews. They aren't completely immoral liars, like the company writing me.
I asked an Amazonian about this once, and they said the algo worked for them in sales, because enough people go to the "in the style of" or actually want that and so I am SOL.
You would think there could be a search setting "specific author name == author, no extras" or something, if they wanted to maximise utility and choice.
It's the one place I can find all the books my kids need for school. You search with an ISBN and always find exactly what you want.
Other things I buy elsewhere.
And even if you go into a normal retail shop with a product in mind, all the available options showcased can "distort" your actual intent. Because that's what the shop is designed to do: to showcase, and even in that showcase, some products are placed/showcased so they catch your attention.
I doubt anyone chooses to create shoddy products just so they have more money to market them..
It doesn’t seem all that egregious to me.
How exactly is Amazon preventing the customer from meeting the merchant? What is the precise mechanism?
It is bad for the same reasons that the Amazon Tax mentioned in the post is bad…
Many times I search for a restaurant like McDonalds and the top result won’t be the one nearest to me…it will be a sponsored result for one that is farther away from me.
Pretty wild that Google does this. It’s bad for people. It’s bad because instead of picking the best choice to be the top, Google is showing a worser choice for money.
The same reason why this blog mentions that the Amazon Tax is bad.
I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.
I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.
Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
My goal has now shifted to identify the thinnest intermediary between my dollars and the person doing the labor for the product/service I'm paying for.
Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
Recently a nice wooden piece from a shop in Germany and an address sign for my yard from some place in the Midwest.
For some things you do see endless shops selling cheap Chinese imports.
"Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness and their stock price are aligned, for now.
I pushed Purchase on Amazon one day and was opening the package 36 minutes later. I can barely drive down to a gas station, get a coke and come back in that time. But I wanted a particular, random item one morning and was setting it up within the hour without leaving my seat. Ebay and Walmart and Local shop can't do that.
I support leaving out of principle, that's laudable. But it won't be because they aren't good at delivering CX.
But they're not maximizing repeat customers, they're maximizing repeat customers multiplied by product fees. (roughly)
They would prefer 100M customers paying $4 a product over 250M customers paying $1 a product.
They keep driving up product fees more and more, reducing how happy the buying experience is.
After spending close to 6 months and countless phone calls trying to get a refund processed the bad experience is outweighing the good for me.
The entire experience on the unhappy path is so obnoxiously dreadful i don’t purchase anything on Amazon over an amount I’d be fine just losing. Even though 99% of my orders have been absolutely fine.
That doesn’t sound like being customer focused or obsessed at all.
Not to mention that finding previous orders via email is much, much faster than going through their website.
Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.
I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.
We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.
> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.
They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.
wrt to article insight, Benedicts Evans has been mentioning Ads being the major profit driver at Amazon in his newsletter since 2-3 years ago.
This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)
Amused so many people here seem to be pushing etsy. I saw the same supposedly hand-made mugs on sale by hundreds of people on etsy a few years ago.
I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.
It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.
There is no single website that offers similar solution where my payment is saved and I can just buy and forget.
Only thing I’ve successfully replaced is grocery shopping.
The most common issue for me is what happened when I bought a custom dog bowl, thinking the ceramic was made by the seller. Later stumbled upon something similar and realized it was just an off the shelf bowl and the dog’s name had been painted on. That not worth nothing, and it was still probably nicer than what I could’ve gotten on Amazon, and maybe I should’ve asked before buying. But there’s just a lot of that, “make a quick buck” type of stuff and it’s not always obvious.
I didn't downvote you - and I agree with the sentiment that Whole Foods is also Amazon - but the meta complaining isn't beneficial to the conversation.
For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it.
All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in either advertising spend or in the etsy-profiting metrics that drive algorithmic discovery.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
There are still lots of good reasons to shop local, but I’m not sure speed is the best reason.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
I live in central nyc, been only a few times to a Costco, and had no idea they even do any shipping! I assumed that part of all those good prices is the smaller selection, large minimum quantities, and that you have to get yourself there with a car to get it in person.
Yes, all of us who are not wealthy must have an upper limit to what we can support, and maybe 25% is over your limit, but please don't ignorantly accuse them of ripping you off when you clearly know nothing of the costs of vastly different scales of business.
There has been a lot of consolidation in this space. Part of that means that independent webstores closed up and moved exclusively to Amazon. If they did not close up shop, they now use Shop/Shopify or a similar SaaS, which streamlines sign-ups, sign-ins, and checkouts, for better or worse. All the better if you've got PayPal or Apple/Google Pay.
I've noticed that a lot of "click and mortar" stores have really abysmal product on their physical shelves. Like, it's discontinued, or all the wrong sizes, subtly defective, or just undesirable. It's like their stores are kind of dumping grounds, and it makes sense, because the sort of person in 2026 who gets in a car, and shops in a store, and grabs stuff uncritically off the shelf is not your most discerning or astute shopper.
Target's shopping experience remains better than most. Their stores include everyday needs like groceries and medicine, so I can meet a lot of my needs by dropping in. Furthermore, their app-based shopping (marketplace) is pretty good too, so if I need housewares delivered or something, or I need to look up something and find it right now, in-store, their app is right there. And their shopping carts now have little dedicated slots to drop in your smartphone next to the cupholders.
The best online shopping is Office Depot/OfficeMAX. They've shrunk their retail footprint, but their online store is still a non-marketplace, and really good for buying the kinds of things they sell. That includes some non-intuitive buys, like you can find kitchen supplies, because they stock many breakrooms for small/medium businesses. Good place for electronics and accessories and art supplies, even if you are just comparison-shopping. Their delivery is rapid and often just comes from the nearest store!
Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to rent a car to go pickup my package.
Amazon has absolutely nailed the delivery here. They looked at how people struggle with online orders and streamlined it completely. It’s such a blessing not to have to deal with delivery drivers anymore.
If Amazon charged €10 extra per package I would still order with them.
eg. wanted to purchase a FIio KA17 DAC - amazon price £150, asked an llm for an alternative, found for £120 from a decent small audiovisual real store, ordered, delivered within 3 days.
Have found you can save money for purchases from cosmetics to garden fertilizer and grass seed to audiovisual and IT equipment.
Am I getting old? I feel like a dinosaur still Googling things.
Having to add "reddit" to get genuine results was already a meme 3 years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY&pp=ygUXZ29vZ2xlI...
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
However if you live in a historical city center where your address is the equivalent of “That small door if you go up two stairs behind the old tavern” then package deliveries plain suck. Especially since you don’t have the “village postmen” anymore. You have ten delivery companies and none of them have fixed routes.
Shopping at Amazon perpetuates the monopolization and consolidation of players in the economy. That means less competition. That means less incentive to improve the value they provide.
Seems pretty clear to me that shopping with Amazon makes things worse for everyone in the long run.
I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.
> Advertisement serves to increase purchase of the inferior product.
> The best product, which previously didn't require ads [on Amazon] now must pay Amazon to compete for eyeballs.
Advertisement, when successful, increases the purchasing of any product, generally. That the best product is subject to this effect and competition has nothing to do with Amazon or technology.
Per the classic https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes
Subway platforms are filled with ads and force us to think about upcoming sales and broadway shows.
Television is full of ads and makes us think about all kinds of things we don't care about.
Restaurant menus advertise the items at the top of the menu to the detriment of the items in small print down below.
Memes of all kinds live or die by their attention fitness. If a book, play, or video game fails to get enough attention it dies, goes out of print, never makes it to broadway, and never gets ported to the new system. So if there is a way to cheat the attention system by paying a little money to push the thing in front of a few more eyeballs, makers and publishers are gonna do it.
Advertising is fundamentally un democratic because it assumes an imbalance of power - the power of those who control the publishing, the power those who can pay more.
this is really bad comparison
a subway platform ad doesn't dictate the way consumers use the subway.
a restaurant does not monitor the effectiveness of the ads in their menus, analyse their industry and rip off their product with an in-house brand (amazon basics)
amazon is not a marketplace, it is a surveillance platform built to allow amazon to take ownership of more and more markets
to say this is just a problem with ads is defeatist instead getting real tangible change
This is it.
And then I do what it seems most Australians still do — go to a mall, or visit a specialty retailer, or use a specialty retailer’s clunky website and find exactly the thing I need and order it there and get it a few days later.
It’s quite refreshing to go out on the shopping streets or to the malls, and see many people out and about shopping. Likewise, the staff in stores are well-informed and helpful, and make the shopping experience pleasant and efficient.
Amazon is why we can’t have nice shopping experiences in the US.
At least ads give the sellers a chance to compete for eyeballs 'legitimately'. The same marketing budget will not just vaporize if there is no ad space. It will be spent on fake reviews and even fake customers.
People who hate ads don't realize buying ads is the least evil way to compete for customers' attention.
I was recently searching for some draw runners of a certain fixed size. Just cheap ones for some drawers I'm making for a workbench.
Found some cheap ones but not the correct length, but it made me realise something; If I sorted by price low to high the cheap ones did not show on any of the results pages. Amazon was purposefully showing me more expensive products.
I took some info from the cheap ones, searched for that, and the ones I wanted showed up in the search.
I wonder if anyone has trawled all of Amazon, and made a better search tool that doesn't try to rip anyone off?
Anyway, I am starting to find products cheaper outside of Amazon, including p&p.
FWIW - I agree with the premise of the article, but I have to say - the reason these types of practices are acceptable in American culture is exactly because of prominent "marketing gurus".
"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
People go where the mindshare is. It doesn't matter if its ad-ridden drivel and slop, it just needs to be popular.
The number of people who use OpenAI's products because "ai == chatgtp [sic]" in their minds is immense. Just like how to a ton of people, "online shopping == amazon".
I'm not arguing Amazon or OpenAI will always have this role, but while they have that the benefits of this position is immense.
In the recent past, there was a browser extension called "Honey", which purported to find and apply the best coupon code for you when you online shopped. Turned out they were actually (amongst other things), in cahoots with the shops by ensuring that you get only a modest discount, rather than the best available coupons (and this was paid for by the shop).
To get something in front of someone you need to do some work. These guys have the people so they charge you to show it to them. I'm realistically not going off Amazon. If you want to list the ebook on your website maybe I'll buy it there, but if you do a physical copy your 'tax' is going to Shopify. That's how it is.
the point is that, if airfryer B is rival of A, and B buys ads (to let amazon show B ahead of A even if they searched for A), and A doesn't buy ads, then if B resorts to marketing to lower the quality just enough to compete, then all the quality focus of A will not end up increasing their sales.
more importantly, to have a good view on which products are good which one are the best is not available inside of amazon that easily. reusing sku, tricking people into buying inferior ones does not impact amazon in any way since return costs are paid by the fba vendor, or seller.
Is it worse for me as a consumer? I'm not convinced.
After going mildly buckwild on amazon after 3 years of not ordering a single thing (after a move to the country) I let the free month of prime I was using expire. This, and the counterfeit product I got (and had to spend 45 minutes on the internet and phone to get refunded) was decisive. I'll try again in 5 years.
anecdata and all, but i've had the exact opposite experience - I've never spent more than a couple of minutes getting a refund, and it's always been less time and effort than returning something to a B&M store.
ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective.
Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chinese EV ban).
He will likely be successful in doing this and allow the US to slide further into modern technological irrelevancy at his own benefit.
Way worse than Amazon because at least Amazon is just showing you products and telling you how much they cost.
On the Amazon homepage that has never happened. It usually just shows some banner ad for prime day, new amazon tv show/movie, then maybe 4 little thumbnails of the last product I searched for or whatever. I have to initiate the shopping experience, I have to pique my own purchasing interest.
The first is price. The stuff is cheap, as in so cheap I know it will be terrible and I still sort of don’t care. It’s $2, if I only use it twice I got my moneys worth.
That makes it super easy to hit Buy without thinking much.
The second is that they appear to target verticals that don’t have a natural ceiling to sales. I only need one microwave, so they won’t sell me that. They do sell a lot of apparel, decorations, toys for adults (crappy 3D displays, not dildos), stuff where you don’t think “eh, I already have one though”.
The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really. Swipe to next video, see it’s an ad, hit buy, confirm Apple Pay pop up, scroll to next video. You can decide you want something, buy it, and be on your next video in 15 seconds. It’s so fast it almost blurs the line where I’m not sure if I’d call it shopping or entertainment.
The last is that they’re really good at luring consumers to start selling on there. The ads for stuff tend to be sort of home made and low quality, which makes it seem attainable for your average person. That tends to mean a huge selection. I had a buddy that randomly decided to sell stickers on there just based on watching other people do it (no idea how that went, I didn’t ask)
> The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really.
No reason to get congress involved when you can have the president suspend duty-free de minimus with executive authority.
There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.
To be clear, when I do use LLM for search, I don't limit it to one site.
Second, I found a product I liked but was the wrong size. As far as I could tell, they can’t even show you recommended similar products. They show you what other people clicked on or bought in the same order. But not just actually similar products in the same style.
In Europe, it led to the creation of the competing Amadeus system which did not keep display preferences and now dominates the market.
I do not understand why sellers accept this practice. I'd assume it would run afoul of some trademark law but the distinct lack of lawsuits indicates that either the legal grounds are shaky... or the sellers themselves find some advantage in it.
Likewise, once corporations blow past a revenue cap, they shouldn't be eligible for lower rate of corporate tax. If the US is any cautionary tale (it always is), it's a moral imperative not to let corporations get too big. Letting corporations grow big and still avail tax cuts, is like feeding your own cancer.
They do this with sole traders who face a £14k (~$20k) slab tax bill (VAT) if they go from £85k to £85,001 (~$100k). The outcome has been near total depletion of skill tradesman "mate" apprenticeships. Since such people (not being totally stupid) take 3 months off per year or work 4 days per week and turn down jobs.
this is framed as amazon doing something wrong, but it sounds like what's actually happening is that his marketer is wasting money. of course amazon is going to accept money if you give it to them for the things they're already doing for free. why shouldn't they?
The great Bezos said ones and people, companies, stock market loved it. Now new CEO is noticing Amazon customers also have some margin and hence more opportunity for Amazon.
This is the worst part.
Google Ads are the same. I pay about $2 per click for my EXACT PRODUCT NAME search, otherwise 6 other competitor ads are shown on top of google search before the actual results
Theoretically. Amazon doesn't give a shit about well being or enrichment of it's employees. Every single one of the them. They tried to squeeze the productivity and since the Stock has been doing well, many employees have made a reasonable money. But forget the well being or profit sharing aspects with the employees.
Shouldn't the very same marketing companies buying these ads know this? Why are they misleading their clients?
All these same incentives are at work in supermarket aisles and big box stores, shaping which products you see and are offered at what price. You think if you walk into Best Buy and ask them to show you laptops, the one they push you to look at is going to be the ‘best’ on offer? Or is it perhaps the one which is set up with the best sales staff commission this month?
Distribution channels have never been neutral champions of the consumer.
Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences.
If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it.
Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens.
Only Amazon knows how many affiliate links lead to actual sales, how many ebook pages are actually read, what the CTR on ads really is, and so on.
> Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences.
20+ years ago the exact same accusations were leveled against Walmart.
I still don't see the difference.
> If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it.
Amazon is giving many people a platform they had no other hope of having. Years ago, for a while, I got deep into Amazon selling. An average Joe who is a full time employee can quickly set up a business, get some manufacturing contracts in China, and start selling on Amazon.
In the old days, that Joe would never be allowed on Walmart's shelves.[1] So it's equally true with Walmart: That average Joe would not be able to get a human to help him, because the humans would exclude him to begin with. Amazon is giving the average Joe more opportunity than they ever had. We're merely criticizing them for not giving those kinds of sellers great service.
Even for those who could get into Walmart - they made capricious decisions all the time that would impact your sales. If you were a small seller, you had no power over Walmart.
> Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens.
If the goal of your comment is to list all the reasons Amazon sucks - there's no need. I could write that list for you - I try not to buy from Amazon myself. The submission is specifically about their ads, as was my comment.
[1] Arguably, that's a good thing, and Amazon's lack of curation is one of the reasons I don't shop at Amazon, but it is besides the point here.
This kind of law would wreak havoc for certain companies (and content creators). However, just like prediction markets, ads distort and ruin the very thing they are trying to optimize.
Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience.
If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t?
Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there.
Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel.
Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.
No company is "entitled" to any sales.
1. qualified for by right according to law
2. having a right to certain benefits or privileges
3. having a right or legitimate claim to something
No company is qualified for sales according to law, or has a right to sales, or has a legitimate claim on sales. Sales must be earned by besting the competition.
No company is "entitled" to any sales.
Another place to discover new books was Goodreads. Bought and left to rot by Amazon.
I don't buy many books anymore.
There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like?
But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail.
The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.
I don't know what you mean by that. I used to live in a tier 2 European city pre Internet and there were lots of things that were a pain to buy. We'd often have to check multiple stores. Specialty hobbies were served by one or two shops that you had to drive to. I remember having to take the train to a different city to buy a memory card for my computer. There was real consumer cost and societal cost.
The warehouse and online order model is economically a lot more efficient. The real question is what to do with the surplus it generates, make Bezos richer or something else?
OTOH, Amazon grocery delivery in cities does do a LOT toward reducing their impact on poor people (who are not-poor enough to pay for Amazon delivery) (which might be cheaper than bus tickets). Hate on Amazon and Bezos all you want; some good comes out of it.
It's like GOogle when ads outweighed your search results. Amazon has become a garbage pit.
I rarely order anything from Amazon these days, maybe once or twice a year. Everything feels like a rip-off or fake. I don't trust the search function at all. Nor do I trust the customer ratings. The only exception is if I buy from a brand I already know that has its own brand-shop, owned directly by the manufacturer.
It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.
This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.
This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.
Google ads work exactly the same way.
As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.
If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.
("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)
It reads as though he’s just discovering how the digital advertising industry works (and he's a marketer) ... not just Amazon, but also Google etc.
- improving search results vs less ad revenue
- promoting their own products vs merchants'
- streamlining the shopping vs trying to sell more stuff
As long as these fundamental conflicts aren't resolved, it's not going to improve.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/marketplaces-airbnb-future-foun...
To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.
[1] The author tries to escape this requirement by calling it "legal theft" but that's an oxymoron.
Ads too, I guess
In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...)
So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to bring it to my front door? I never got it.
And unfortunately for them... it keeps happening now?
Like every other package that gets delivered?!
(They always believe this, apparently... either that, or their agreement with their delivery insurance services must eat the cost).
I've more than gotten my muffler refunded now and they're none the wiser, so win win really!
I've been a prime account member in good standing for over 5 years now.
I order thousands of dollars worth of stuff every year.
They're not cancelling my account. Ever.
They seriously don't give a shit. They're not paying these costs. It's all covered. They are not the same company who delivers or insures.
They are for-profit corporation, not our government.
There's a difference.
Maybe when they use a 3rd party delivery service they can strongarm that service into eating the loss. But, where I am, Amazon is usually doing 1st party delivery.
(the reason I assume they don't is that a) they are big enough to eat any loss and b) losses happen at a pretty constant rate. So they would basically be paying an insurer $loss_amount * (1+insurer_margin) in premiums to immediately get payed back $loss_amount. not a great deal.)
This isn't a restaurant and they're not waiters.
What about Amazon's business and subcontracting practices makes you think they're willing to eat any operating expenses whatsoever?
It's gone and confirmed and acknowledged by their support which made me take a screenshot of the popup where the card details are entered to confirm it. They in turned wanted to give me a 15€ gift card for the inconvenience and told them that I wasn't there asking for a gift card or discount and refused it.
So every single time you purchase with your credit card if you do not want your details to be saved, you have to MANUALLY go to your personal settings and remove the added card from your last purchase. Fucking amazing.
On top of that listings are overflowed with chinese brands and/or items that have no correlation to what I'm looking for.
Can someone suggest better alternatives here in Europe?
"If you're not the customer, you're the product".
Well, Amazon actually did it. They made us the customer _AND_ the product. Hooray.
Like LOTS of other people, I, of course, use Amazon. But, more and more often... if I can find a product somewhere else within, say, 5-6%... I'll buy it that someplace else. Especially if that someplace else is actually a building I can walk into and inspect the thing I'm buying before I pay for it.
Shopping on Amazon is getting worse every day. How can it be good for Amazon in the long run that every time I buy something from their site, I actually have to spend time convincing myself that I'm not getting a knock-off product?
In the modern world, every single time money leaves my bank account I feel like I'm potentially being scammed. I hate it.
They have become so big that they harm the buying power of the consumer and the selling power of the producer.
I know this first hand. Company had to give away 1-2 million in free engineering labor for the opportunity to obtain their business.
Have not bought anything from them in over 10 years and never will again.
It is like saying newspaper classified ads are same as Google ads. Not very good comparison.
In the end, we as a society value convenience more than global optima. So we will always land in some local optima. We deserve it.
You can cut Amazon out of your life tomorrow if you wanted. You could do it almost entirely with just Walmart.com if you wanted a dropin replacement.
If you only have one internet provider in your area, that's a monopoly, the cost of switching is essentially 'start an ISP'. Having to type in walmart.com does not make Amazon a monopoly.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
It’s very easy to blame systems and other people.
But I disagree though. Blaming human nature is much much easier. It means there is nothing we can do except give up and live with it.
In contrast, blaming the system means we can still change the system, and changing the system is extremely hard, especially when the rich and powerful have so much interest in keeping the system the way it is.
Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue.
Is it revenue or profit? They are not the same thing.
I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.
OR
B) Don't use Amazon
LOL
There was a time it was good and convenient and the worst of what they are wasn't quite so obvious but that time has passed.
javascript:document.querySelectorAll(".s-result-item:has(.puis-sponsored-label-text)").forEach(function(e){ e.remove()})>They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one
As others have pointed out, without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.
If you are Amazon, this is essentially just the multi-armed bandit problem, at it is not particularly difficult. You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it.
You just handwaved away the hardest problem. What is 'enough'? What if the first user failed to plug it in and left a 1/5? Or liked it but left a 3/5 anyways? And what if you show it too many people so now rebranding products and just dropshipping them takes off?
This feels comical to me today, but I can imagine a near future where paid AI ads gaslit you into believing that the product you searched for is vastly inferior to the product AI "recommends".
Amazon as the marketplace facilitator has an interesting job to run:
1) It wants customers to get exactly what they want (as measured by the minimal amount of clicking/scrolling/time it takes for a customer to hit the landing page -> complete shopping). This is mostly customer-centric.
2) It wants to promote as much competition as it can between products and brands so that no seller dominates the market. This is... mildly customer-centric so big sellers can't rest on their laurels, and mostly self-serving (so no single seller/brand can gain enough power to threaten Amazon).
3) Amazon has to strike a balance of #1 and #2 so that there's some opportunity for new entrants to enter any product space. Back in the days they structured search so that some percentage of results would be new sellers and products, and new products would get some amount of sessions to prove they convert within a certain statistical distribution to land a certain rank (BSR). Note the rise of alphabet soup Amazon brands is partially because they allowed for disposable brands that could be black-hatted, and partially because for a few years these sellers were just generating tons of new brands to share new SKU real estate on search results (so when you searched for "small kitchen colander" or what not, you'd find the same product being sold by 10 sockpuppet sellers occupying 10 search spaces, taking result space away from the other sellers).
But what if they can get everyone to partially pay for #3? Enter ads, where basically new and old brands pay to play for eyeballs on Amazon.
So if you think about it, Amazon is a search problem where you wanna push results such that the expected value of the results pushed yield the highest expected value, something along the lines of: Expected Value (EV) of your product = [your sales price] x [your product's conversion rate in the past X days] x [some confidence level of said conversion rate] - [returns] + [whatever other Amz secret sauce] + [Amazon PPC]
Amazon can get people to pay for their eyeballs, swap some seller blackhat tactics for others, and more or less keep OK results. So that's Amazon's end.
As an established seller -- I know my product converts at X%, so as long as the math works out where I spend $Y/click, expect it to convert at X%, and my profit Z > Y * X it's what I do (and the tax I pay), and I move that up and down depending on my inventory situation. If possible, yes, I would pass some of that down to price raises as long as the market's willing to bear it, so I can make a minimum margin requirement off my Amazon channel (which is the lowest, compared to my D2C website or through offline B&M channels, but I do so because my biggest volume is on-Amazon).
As a customer... yeah the default search results are "good enough" for the 80-20 crowd; the convenience, ease-to-checkout, and 1-2 day shipping wins them over. As a "nerdy" customer who likes researching products to get the best one, I used to research via online reviews and reddit (most of which are gamified in their own ways)... but now I use AI (ChatGPT, *not* Amazon's Alexa Shopping because it's not great) and mostly call it a day.
What baffles me is that e-commerce sites all tend to get worse with time. The moment a site I like turns into a marketplace, I know it will only go downhill.
Ad industry is an example that markets don't correctly solve everything.
What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.
One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.
I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.
I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.
Amazon doesn't need to be so big and in so many industries. My pharmacy doesn't also need to be a movie studio. My cloud provider doesn't also need to be a self publishing business. It distorts too many things.
You should do what I do: look for someplace else to buy from first. Amazon has "everything" - if you can find it. However there are usually small sellers of that niche (often niche.com) where they know something about the product and will direct your to the best one without adds. The smaller/weirder the niche the more likely this seller is to be helpful. You get to support "the little guy", and get a good product for a good price. Even if Amazon is cheaper, the smaller store is still the better value because you get a good product.
Mostly I don't do this because I don't know which company makes the one I want. An independent third party that knows the product and sells several different versions from different companies can help me select which one is best for me. This is a valuable service - when you can find it.
The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.
One would be tempted to think that doing things different and actually providing a good service for consumers, sellers, etc would be a multibillion dollar business, but somehow it seems like it isn't.
Sure, this is probably accurate in many situations.
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far [for Seth Godin's new book, The Knot] is the search "Seth Godin The Knot".
But not that one. If you cut spending on that ad to zero, you would lose an immeasurably small number of sales. The ad is high yield because people who search for "Seth Godin The Knot" are already planning to buy Seth Godin's The Knot. Letting other people display ads on top of that search won't dissuade them.
Seems bad.
> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.
The stealing is, of course, much more fundamental than the search tax.
I am reminded of the saying by 19th-century French social thinker Proudhon, who said: "La propriete? C'est le vol!" ("Property? Why, that's theft!") - he was describing interactions which, at that time, it was conceivably possible to manage collectively for the public benefit - taken over by individuals, institutions and mechanisms economically benefits a small few to the detriment of the majority (farmers and laborers). The Amazon product search example is different, but then, also not so different. I mean, it's just search - and the blog post author knows it could just be implemented reasonably so that people who want to find his book find his book. Then suddenly, Amazon put a fence around that field and demands you pay a part of your annual yield for it to allow you to farm that field, and not drive you off by force. And that metaphor is probably quite clear to you even though there are no farmers, fields or fences in the blog post.
Amazon's not stealing that money from its stockholders, which is who
These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
substitute for literally any business name
Sure, I know the right one to click on, if I'm in a sound state of mind. What if I'm sleepy? Stressed? 65+ years old?
If you don't, it's absolutely horrible.
This assertion lacks evidence. An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself. The ad will earn you a click-through to the product, but buyers will begin to back out instead of following through with a purchase. Ad purchases cannot overcome insufficient revenue - it won't be profitable long-term.
Yes, Amazon has a problem with vendors buying good reviews as well. It doesn't overcome a high number of poor reviews, or a high number of returns.
> And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.
Reeks of a conspiracy theory. Most customers simply don't have the time or energy to research any more than the top handful of results. Only a rare person goes 10 pages deep into the search results. Organic search results will produce less traffic when people don't even look at them. But that's not evidence in and of itself that the organic search results were nerfed in some way.
I hate to remind people of the basic truth about modern Amazon, but here goes: the vast majority of the inventory is made in China and the exact same product can be found at a tiny, tiny fraction of the Amazon price on AliExpress and similar sites. The value that Amazon adds is their logistic network that can deliver to domestic US addresses in a day or two, compared to weeks. The difference in price between Amazon and AliExpress justifies sellers spending enormous sums on ads and review purchases, because even if they do sell garbage on Amazon, enough people bought it at such ridiculous margins that the seller can tear down the product with the bad reviews and high return rate and re-offer it under a new brand with the same ad and review purchase strategy and still make a profit. But the person to blame for that is not Amazon, and it's not the seller, it's the fool who decides to pay the ridiculous price compared to the AliExpress price.
Books are one of the categories where they aren't printed in China, they're not sold on AliExpress, and searching for "seth godin the knot" returns the actual correct listing as the first organic search result. So I'm not sure why the author brings his book up as evidence. He might do better by reminding his publisher that "selling on Amazon" is not a homogenous experience and they ought to reconsider flushing money down the drain on advertisements they don't need.
Yeah but at the time when I buy it it's gonna have thousands of 5 star reviews, and the images themselves will be the shiniest most beautiful garbage ever seen by mankind.
Fine. Except now after one second, the whole page changes and then there's only one book on the page and it has nothing to do with the book I actually searched for.
So obviously they know about the book I want because they just showed it to me but then they make it disappear in favor of one I don't want but which I presume is one the publisher paid them to show me.
My workaround is to search on Amazon in a private tab so they don't know who I am. In that case the book I want shows up and I can click on it and get its URL and then paste it into the original Amazon window where I'm already logged in, and I can order it. Except I don't, because I'm so disgusted by this I go directly to the publisher's website and order it there.
This is ridiculous.
Amazon is throwing money on the floor with this behavior and they're probably just begging for a restraint of trade class-action lawsuit.
Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.
People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
Even for the buyer, there are second order consequences if you remove the ability for sellers to effectively sell. If sellers can't effectively ramp, they're going to turn to other platforms. If new sellers can't compete on Amazon, prices will increase and diversity of options will go down.
I'm not saying ads in search are a hard necessity in every platform. I'm just asking people to think through the whole issue before making snap judgments because ads are annoying to them.
Put another way, the buyer uncertainty about your product actually, concretely makes your product worse. They don't know whether your thing will fail. The don't know whether you will go out of business if they need support. All else equal, either your product is not the best product, or you need to offer a lower price. Ads are a way to instead just pay someone to straight up lie (i.e. defraud) and say it's recommended when it's not.
I'll be the first to admit I don't know the specifics, but I imagine in some cases, it's economically prohibitive to lower the price by such an amount that it makes up for the uncertainty in a typical search algorithm.
Another possibility would be for the marketplace to be better able to load information about your product so you could provide some more information and reduce that uncertainty. E.g. that you use different (better) materials in your construction. Or you could work with the marketplace to purchase or demonstrate some kind of insurance policy to mitigate support concerns. Basically allow those unknown pieces of information to be discoverable by search engines and the customer. If the market has more knowledge, then if you have a better product, it should organically rank better. Either way, ads do literally nothing to benefit the buyer since they provide zero information (actually they provide a negative piece of information: someone paid for you to see something, so you can assume it's not in your interest to see it).
This is a lazy strawman and not what the author of the post argued for.
> It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
Then maybe contribute to the dialog on that front. The article did so more than your comment setting up a strawman.
You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.
If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.
> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place
Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.
Except, apparently, the surface that's actually closest to the purchasing decision? Why must that surface be forbidden?
Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.
Just get your products reviewed by trusted reviewers, if you can budge them maybe you deserve a bit of attention from us. Someone who has a stake in being trusted for their fair reviews.
Ads are a scourge.
I actually prefer Dr. Pepper, but a lot of people think Coke makes the best cola, Apple makes the best laptops, etc.
While this isn't necessarily the reality for sodas, this is the reality for darn near every thing I look to buy off Amazon.
and exclusively paying attention to what doctors say:
https://www.health.com/what-happens-when-you-stop-drinking-s...
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP...
I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.
As much as I'd like to agree with the article's point and am critical of Amazon etc etc, you lost me here. $35k cash bonus for every employee does not pass the smell test. I'm sure the delivery driver who famously needs to pee into a bottle because they can't afford a toilet break would love such a bonus, but they don't get one.
This makes me doubt everything in the article. Which is really a shame because such articles are necessary. But you need to keep your facts straight, otherwise you are completely disqualifying yourself from any serious discourse. At least for me.
There is enough to criticise with Amazon. Just keep to the things that are true.
But that aside, what part do you disagree so strongly with?
52 weeks * $1B weekly advertising profit / 1.5M employees = ~$35000
I don't know how he's determining profit, but quarterly advertising revenue is ~$20B and margins are presumably very high.
Of course hair splitting can make things "technically true" but that doesn't make this any more suitable to a serious debate in which the other side is playing dirty and the main argument against that is that dirty is bad. That argument loses its sting if itself embedded in dirt.
It's not the only questionable figure in Seth's post. He also drops an ad for his new book within 2.5 short paragraphs. While criticising ad practices.
He writes "if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place". Who is entitled to ...what exactly? Maybe you could argue the best air frier should get the top search result spot. Already calling that "entitled" is a stretch though, let alone being entitled to a sale.
He writes "Who ends up paying the more than $50 billion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sellers. Sellers can’t make heartfelt donations for long. It’s you." It's economics 101 that such overhead, just like taxes, is ultimately split between buyer and seller. Profits go down and paid prices go up. Seth surely knows this (if not then he should not be blogging about economics) but chooses to give you the simplified version to push a narrative. Which is sad. Again, there is enough to legitimately criticise.
I don't want to keep listing more of this, but it's really not feeling particularly honest discourse if you bend things while claiming a moral highground. Cause that makes you lose it.
Unless your goal as an author is just to fuel outrage, no matter cost. Sure, an option, but not part of a serious debate then. Which, again, is a shame.
I had no trouble parsing it, but then again, I'm used to people whining about how they're getting screwed because their employer made so $1M/employee but they're not getting paid $1M.
Otherwise - yeah, I was not impressed with the article. Ads are acting just like ads always have. There is nothing special he could point out about Amazon's ads.
It's unreal to me that you can search for a specific doctor's name in a specific town and end up seeing a sponsored result that uses the doctor's name in the ad's title but it's not the real office, instead it's someone else entirely.