I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
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.
I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
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.
I look for independent artists and craftspeople. I recent bought a pack of sci-fi posters for my apartment from an artists who designs it herself and who has an independent reputation.
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 suffers from the same review astroturfing and product category crowding that Amazon does, but the product categories tend to be narrower so it's never quite as bad.
Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
The person you responded to has a good point though. It does take some diligence on Etsy to avoid people reselling or drop shipping mass produced items.
The best part about not using Amazon is I get to get my stuff quicker, and I can see/feel it. Buying clothes off Amazon is basically the worst thing ever, for instance.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
"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.
Mostly I'm buying Amazon groceries because here in Boston if you don't have a car and access to Costco, wow are your local shops over-priced. Wholefoods, Star Market, and Trader Joes are all at least 25% more expensive.
This. I only have an Amazon account for a specific item - a dried soup mix that my mom who is off the grid, lives for. No PRime, no other purchases and if I could find the product elsewhere, I'd leave Amazon in a heartbeat. For the rest of it, my online shopping is mostly ebay. Been on it since the start and have had zero issues with any merchant or product (mostly used computer kit or repair items) that I've purchased.
As someone who sells actually custom created stuff on Etsy, it’s still definitely the best place for that but the alibaba and temu junk is growing on the platform.
Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined.
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.
If you have a Costco nearby, highly recommend for the products they carry. I pay for the executive membership, and also ship products to where ever I need using their online shopping.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
Is the Costco shipping good / good inventory / similar or same as in store prices? Should I consider it if living in a city like ny?
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.
I deleted my Amazon account earlier this year. I have yet to feel like I am stuck and unable to get something. It has made me turn directly to the seller, so it then I know every single dollar is going to them, versus most of it going to the seller and Amazon getting a cut. It has also made me look closely at places in my city where I can pick things up. I've found a few new shops I didnt know existed because the default was Amazon. The only bummer was I lost about 5 years of Audible books, most I listened to once but a few were repeat listens. I will just pick them up on Libro when I get the desire to listen to it again.
There are a lot of cases where I go direct-to-vendor. Particularly for niche products such as supplements and men's cosmetics, it is easier to find one or two trustworthy distributors or manufacturers who have most of what I want.
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!
Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home.
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.
For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in the world by allowing alternate stores to keep going.
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.
In my house we have something from Amazon show up several times per week. They usually deliver when they say they will (often the same day), returns are a breeze (occasionally they refund us and don't want the item back), and I don't think I've ever had an issue with counterfeit items.
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have.
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 was something I would have never understood living in the US until I moved to France 4 months ago. And yeah, as much as I dislike the company, those lockers are clutch.
Package delivery is pretty good when you live in a country with a standardized address system, large homes and where the delivery driver can park in front of your home.
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.
I love that Perplexity just beat them in court because AIs are at least one hammer that might smash this bullshit. It's so sad, Amazon is chasing every short-term dollar at the expense of long-term success. I have also been moving my purchases away from them - might as well buy direct from the Chinese sellers rather than use Amazon as a middleman.
If it is only 25% more, you are NOT getting ripped off. Mere economies of scale and purchasing power yield Amazon more than 25% lower costs. the mom & pop stores you accuse of ripping you off likely have even slimmer margins than Amazon, even at their prices.
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.
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. 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 (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."
It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
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...
Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
Even without the ads, Amazon search is abysmal. It seems to ignore half the words you enter. I often resort to using Google or ChatGPT to find items on Amazon which I know are there, but which their search box doesn't surface.
It’s wild. I was trying to find a cheap bookshelf with a specific style the other day. Firstly, I couldn’t filter by exact width. It autogenerated a width range (like 24-30”) which was different on subsequent searches and several inches away from what I wanted.
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.
I imagine most readers haven't tried tiktok shop (or similar Chinese consumer shopping platforms).
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.
Its hard to pin down specifically. As a general rule: When I land on the homepage of the TikTok shop, without touching my screen I _generally_ see something that I am interested in buying. Its like it predicts what I am there to search for, and its quite accurate.
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.
I hate videos when shopping. Videos are not skimmable. I don’t want to watch and listen to a salesperson sell the product to me. I want at least a modicum of individual agency and choice. I already skip all product videos on Amazon. I hate the product images too as they have become too salesy and they sometimes no longer even show important facts printed on the packaging itself (like the ingredient list or Nutrition Facts / Supplement Facts).
Fair; While I can only speak to TikTok shop (as its the only one I've interacted with), the videos typically take the place where product photos would be on the product page. A swipe dismisses it and its replaced with the product photos. The core browsing experience does not show videos in lieu of product photos from what I have seen.
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum.
I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad.
Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
This plus the login-walled reviews is unfortunate because once I stopped buying from Amazon I'd continue to go there to browse before buying elsewhere.
Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.
lots of people here defending amazon blindly seem to be unaware of the full picture of how amazon ads works in the context of the marketplace.
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.
When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. I hate the number of 10-packs of things I get where I only need one. (Luckily I live in a block of flats where there's a good community, so often I get those for free just by asking on our Signal group!)
It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.
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.
Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S
More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
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.
My current strategy is to skip ads and skip any name that is just a jumble of letters. But the garbage producers are getting so good with AI they can create entire websites with US addresses and pictures of buildings and employees and none of it is real.
> 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.
"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.
How do you get someone to review your product if you're one of N? Paid reviews? Not independent anymore. Paying money to get some exposure and sales is the best of all bad options.
"The best" for many products is often static, on the level of decades. Better e-commerce websites than Amazon will curate away all the garbage and only show you the best things. At this point you can pretty much use the top 5 results from any Amazon search to rule out things NOT to buy.
>"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product ... Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?
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.
Good thing Godwin has never had to worry about writing the best book then. If it weren’t for internet marketing I doubt he’d have survived on the quality of his snake oil alone.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. This is no different than grocery stores selling shelf space. It is not at all like theft (morally wrong) or taxes (infamously inefficient). And if you don't do it, you go out of business since you aren't competitive with someone that does. It's sad that such obvious rage bait makes it to the top of hacker news.
An idea I've played around with in the past is to have some sort of law that limits how much revenue a company can make from ads. For example, a law that says "A company cannot make more than 10% of its gross revenue from ads or selling customer data".
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.
Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either.
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.
> The world would probably be a healthier place economically if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores and independent shops.
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?
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.
Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right?
I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to target a query, they'll eventually need to target a vector and its neighborhood, and there will be some greater opacity facing advertisers trying to match "middle-income US users shopping for airfryers who have product height limits posed by kitchen upper cabinets" or something.
Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.
I have no doubt this will work out even less well than your typical SEO marketing spam site in the offering the best choice for you. AIs recommendations will be those of the highest bidder. Which will also be the lowest quality product they can get away with.
and what stops the amazons of the world from paying the ai provider, and getting your ai to buy from them instead of the best deal? How are you going to check and verify you got the best deal?
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).
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.
In the product search results game, I imagine Google and Amazon will soon have competition from AI chatbots linking to product pages in response to user queries. Also, OpenAI is getting into ad business. Seems like that will add a different place where book publishers could run ads? They will also need to optimize their web pages to be useful to bots looking for information.
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. 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 (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place)"
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.
Yes. Technically, there are situations where the air fryer which is best for you and the air fryer that makes Amazon the most money are the same. However, with the number of airfryers on Amazon it seems safe to assume this is a rare coincidence.
38% of people also think opposing fascism is very unfavourable according to that. Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
> Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
You’re talking about Amazon’s actual customers here. Is Amazon supposed to ignore the opinion of their customers for the opinion of some commenter on HN?
I'm having trouble understanding how this differs from traditional ads - even pre-Internet...? Didn't manufacturers pay to get premium shelf space in a store?
There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store.
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.
I'm sorry, but how does a business writer lead an article with garbage like this:
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.
The only reason I have Prime these days is for the unlimited photo storage and then some extra storage for video. It’s hard to find a convenient and cost effective way to free my data.
The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great.
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)
I feel at least in major urban areas Amazon’s delivery network is efficient enough that they have to artificially delay non-Prime orders. I order from Amazon only occasionally, and while sometimes there’s actual step-by-step tracking I’ll usually see no movement at all for 3+ days, and suddenly the item has dispatched from the warehouse and it is reaching my house in an hour.
Would love a similar post breaking down the rightmove (UK equivalent of zillow) tax.
Fortunately there is currently a court case against them that might help. I am also starting a #RightmoveHygiene campaign to encourage people to spend less time on there.
Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases.
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?
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 would be pretty surprised if Amazon insures their package delivery. Do you have a source for them using insurance?
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.)
I certainly hope so. GP implies that they are committing fraud to "stick it to the man". Nine times out of ten, this simply results in the man sticking it to us again.
Most likely they're sticking it to a delivery contractor. Amazon gets paid, you get your free stuff, and some working class stiff is peeing in a bottle driving a leased truck and not getting paid for their labor. Win win win, right?
I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead
No wonder Amazon sued Perplexity to forbid agents on their site, agents could cut through the crap and find what users wanted instead of what Amazon peddles. They even won the suit.
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.
I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
> And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
Whats going to be hilarious is if brick and mortar companies become popular again because of the painful U.I., scammy companies, and broken search of Amazon.
That's just not going to happen. You have to go out in the rain or heat, pay for parking, maybe not find what you want, pay 30% more than online, so online still has advantages.
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.
Must be some MBA thing. Must maximise revenue in every possible way. I have still no idea why the local white goods (and everything else) seller decided it was smart idea to pollute their own product search by becoming marketplace. I am going to you because well you are not that horrible and actually have store near me.
This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example.
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.
It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned.
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.
Sometimes. Larger companies will not do that since it makes the places that sell most of their things mad to have to compete with the manufacture. (or sometimes they intentionally price such that others can undercut them).
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 ads make sense in capitalism. Without the described effect products would never change. Payment for ads ensures discovery works in adversarial free market.
The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.
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.
App Store is a wasteland, I don't think there are more than 100 good apps in millions. All want in-app-purchase, none is fair to give me an upfront price. I don't want for example my kids being bugged to buy apps that cost $100/week.
cancelled our Prime membership a year ago (after nearly 10 years) and went from buying most non-food things on Amazon to occasionally buying small random items. We broke our addiction to 1 or 2-day shipping, and we're just fine.
Amazon has the most useless search I know.
Also, idk who clicks those 'Sponsored' results, but for me they are an automatic pass. But then again Amazon is such a scumbag company that uses its own brands as a weapon to make sellers pay to be visible.
> It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
You take the money you would've spent on ads and instead offer a lower price than the current leader to make up for the buyer's uncertainty toward your product. This lets a search algorithm organically decide that you are among the top (risk-neutral) value contenders. Once that uncertainty disappears, you will have a higher value product and can therefore command a higher price.
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.
It's a nice idea and I can see it working in some cases.
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.
Then your product is actually worse for the customer. It's nice that you want it to be better, but it's not in a meaningful way that you can't just handwave away. Risk carries a cost.
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).
You're completely ignoring the fact that the majority of people do not expect a search result ranking to be influenced by bidding. Yes it happens, but unless the item is labeled as an ad, most people will infer value that does not exist. And this is wrong. The only reason they appear in the search is so that they do not look like ads.
There's plenty of places to advertise and the best for the consumer is for transparency to exist in the first place.
Amazon is a two-sided marketplace. Why should their obligation in search be 100% to one side?
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.
The article isn't an attack on advertising to bring awareness of your product to an unaware market; it's an attack on being made to pay for a customer who has specifically asked for your product to be shown your product.
Unless your _ads_ are going to compete with your competitors' then that's not going to be effective. Ironically middlemen are probably solution here, you'd be better off going to trade shows and working with department stores that sell air fryers, they'll want to turn your lower cost into their higher margin.
> People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
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.
I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."
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.
I have to agree with OP, this phrase specifically reveals it isn't a good take:
> 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.
right, you've spent most of your capital on product, and now you're competing with everyone else on $/ad.
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.
Say you invent a crap product, and shove ads under my nose to bug me while I want to buy a decent product. Why should I accept that?
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.
The problem is we aren’t in a world of more “reasonable” advertising. What we see deployed now are basically weapons-grade manipulation systems, and upstarts do not have equal access to the arsenal. So yeah, they need to get the word out, but they can’t even do that! The big dogs get better, more privileged access.
Should Dr Pepper have to spend a dollar per purchase to be the top result when you search for "Dr Pepper"? Is it good for the customer that when they search Dr Pepper and they stopped paying for the placement ads the first page is no longer Dr Pepper but instead "UUBUOI SODA 100% SODA COLA POP" AND "FUUOYAY YUM YUM SPARKLE FIZZ 致癌神水"
Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.
Is this not the direct result of consumers being too lazy to price match and price discover? Amazon still has the ability to sort price: low to high. You also still have the ability to ask your friends and family what air fryer they purchased. If the average consumer just implicitly trusts Amazon such that they buy whatever shows up first, that’s not Amazon’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault.
I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
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.
The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions. They're employees of contract companies that put the Amazon logo on their vans.
But that aside, what part do you disagree so strongly with?
> The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions.
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.
Fair, but how easy is it to in that case mistakenly read it like that?
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.
I don't want to start 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've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.
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.
I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.
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.
Generally curious but a lot of the stuff I find on Etsy is the same crap from Alibaba/Amazon .. What are you buying from Etsy that isn't this?
I look for independent artists and craftspeople. I recent bought a pack of sci-fi posters for my apartment from an artists who designs it herself and who has an independent reputation.
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 suffers from the same review astroturfing and product category crowding that Amazon does, but the product categories tend to be narrower so it's never quite as bad.
Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.
It depends what you are looking for. I find small batch or custom made items from small businesses.
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.
I'm not the GP but I bought a wooden lapdesk on Etsy that I use every day.
The person you responded to has a good point though. It does take some diligence on Etsy to avoid people reselling or drop shipping mass produced items.
But Etsy also has these ads, and I find them even harder to identify than on Amazon
The best part about not using Amazon is I get to get my stuff quicker, and I can see/feel it. Buying clothes off Amazon is basically the worst thing ever, for instance.
One day shipping is fast, but I can run to the store in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
"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.
Mostly I'm buying Amazon groceries because here in Boston if you don't have a car and access to Costco, wow are your local shops over-priced. Wholefoods, Star Market, and Trader Joes are all at least 25% more expensive.
Who do you think Wholefoods belongs to?
This. I only have an Amazon account for a specific item - a dried soup mix that my mom who is off the grid, lives for. No PRime, no other purchases and if I could find the product elsewhere, I'd leave Amazon in a heartbeat. For the rest of it, my online shopping is mostly ebay. Been on it since the start and have had zero issues with any merchant or product (mostly used computer kit or repair items) that I've purchased.
did that already years ago :)
As someone who sells actually custom created stuff on Etsy, it’s still definitely the best place for that but the alibaba and temu junk is growing on the platform.
> other online platforms, including Etsy.
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.
There are people who rent time at my local makerspace who sell on Etsy. Maybe the issue is that Etsy doesn't make it easy to find them?
Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined.
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.
This, too. Amazonification/Enshittification
If you have a Costco nearby, highly recommend for the products they carry. I pay for the executive membership, and also ship products to where ever I need using their online shopping.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
Is the Costco shipping good / good inventory / similar or same as in store prices? Should I consider it if living in a city like ny?
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.
I deleted my Amazon account earlier this year. I have yet to feel like I am stuck and unable to get something. It has made me turn directly to the seller, so it then I know every single dollar is going to them, versus most of it going to the seller and Amazon getting a cut. It has also made me look closely at places in my city where I can pick things up. I've found a few new shops I didnt know existed because the default was Amazon. The only bummer was I lost about 5 years of Audible books, most I listened to once but a few were repeat listens. I will just pick them up on Libro when I get the desire to listen to it again.
There are a lot of cases where I go direct-to-vendor. Particularly for niche products such as supplements and men's cosmetics, it is easier to find one or two trustworthy distributors or manufacturers who have most of what I want.
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!
Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home.
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.
For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in the world by allowing alternate stores to keep going.
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.
Why use an LLM for something that is a 5 second Google? Google Products is right there in the top. Forums will advice you on alternative products.
Am I getting old? I feel like a dinosaur still Googling things.
At this point in time…
…you've got to figure that Google is just as disgusting as Amazon in the ads/search dept.
LLMs seem positively naive in that regard. Just, you know, simply suggesting what their subsumption of the internet suggests.
(For now anyway.)
In my house we have something from Amazon show up several times per week. They usually deliver when they say they will (often the same day), returns are a breeze (occasionally they refund us and don't want the item back), and I don't think I've ever had an issue with counterfeit items.
I know Amazon often isn't the lowest price anymore, but that's okay with me as long as their customer service is great.
You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have.
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 was something I would have never understood living in the US until I moved to France 4 months ago. And yeah, as much as I dislike the company, those lockers are clutch.
Package delivery is pretty good when you live in a country with a standardized address system, large homes and where the delivery driver can park in front of your home.
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.
I live in one of those places (Copenhagen) and I prefer the local online shops, since they offer all the delivery choices.
I always choose delivery to the convenience shop on the opposite corner. It's open late, and picking up a parcel takes about a minute.
I cancelled prime this year. It no longer had any value. It's more expensive but shittier in every way.
And with adverts!
eBay is my first go-to.
I love that Perplexity just beat them in court because AIs are at least one hammer that might smash this bullshit. It's so sad, Amazon is chasing every short-term dollar at the expense of long-term success. I have also been moving my purchases away from them - might as well buy direct from the Chinese sellers rather than use Amazon as a middleman.
I would love to support mom and pop stores if they don't charge 25% more than amazon. Here, in NY buying from small store means getting ripped off.
Yeah, those moms and pops are ripping us off, living like… well, not like Bezos.
If it is only 25% more, you are NOT getting ripped off. Mere economies of scale and purchasing power yield Amazon more than 25% lower costs. the mom & pop stores you accuse of ripping you off likely have even slimmer margins than Amazon, even at their prices.
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.
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. 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 (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 it.
It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.
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...
Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
Even without the ads, Amazon search is abysmal. It seems to ignore half the words you enter. I often resort to using Google or ChatGPT to find items on Amazon which I know are there, but which their search box doesn't surface.
It’s wild. I was trying to find a cheap bookshelf with a specific style the other day. Firstly, I couldn’t filter by exact width. It autogenerated a width range (like 24-30”) which was different on subsequent searches and several inches away from what I wanted.
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.
I imagine most readers haven't tried tiktok shop (or similar Chinese consumer shopping platforms).
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.
Do you have some insight into in what areas it’s better and how that is?
Its hard to pin down specifically. As a general rule: When I land on the homepage of the TikTok shop, without touching my screen I _generally_ see something that I am interested in buying. Its like it predicts what I am there to search for, and its quite accurate.
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.
I hate videos when shopping. Videos are not skimmable. I don’t want to watch and listen to a salesperson sell the product to me. I want at least a modicum of individual agency and choice. I already skip all product videos on Amazon. I hate the product images too as they have become too salesy and they sometimes no longer even show important facts printed on the packaging itself (like the ingredient list or Nutrition Facts / Supplement Facts).
Fair; While I can only speak to TikTok shop (as its the only one I've interacted with), the videos typically take the place where product photos would be on the product page. A swipe dismisses it and its replaced with the product photos. The core browsing experience does not show videos in lieu of product photos from what I have seen.
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum. I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad. Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
This plus the login-walled reviews is unfortunate because once I stopped buying from Amazon I'd continue to go there to browse before buying elsewhere.
The amount of review spam is so high that for a good portion of products the reviews are useless.
Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.
That's the real issue
lots of people here defending amazon blindly seem to be unaware of the full picture of how amazon ads works in the context of the marketplace.
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.
When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
of course, the best seller is usually whoever has spent the most on advertising
Results do seem better.. What in this instance, does "Best Sellers" mean?
OH MY GOD this completely fixes the problem. All the ad noise is gone.
This needs to be pinned as the top comment. Thank you!
"Featured", ha ha. Should rename to "Paid For by Ads".
I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. I hate the number of 10-packs of things I get where I only need one. (Luckily I live in a block of flats where there's a good community, so often I get those for free just by asking on our Signal group!)
A cheaper alternative is Argos for a lot of things.
It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.
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.
Enshittification is such a perfect word for all this. Cory Doctorow is a word magician.
Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
The new (to me) Amazon Haul storefront is (to me) hilarious. I was stunned when I first saw it: https://www.amazon.com/haul/store
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.
My current strategy is to skip ads and skip any name that is just a jumble of letters. But the garbage producers are getting so good with AI they can create entire websites with US addresses and pictures of buildings and employees and none of it is real.
> 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.
"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.
Isn't that what independent reviews are generally useful for? To try all the options and share feedback for someone to make their own choice.
How do you get someone to review your product if you're one of N? Paid reviews? Not independent anymore. Paying money to get some exposure and sales is the best of all bad options.
Yes, if you can even get your product high enough on the rankings to make a sale.
The incumbent has a massive advantage, making it harder for a new (but better) product to get on the first page.
For every kind of product one might need to buy?
"The best" for many products is often static, on the level of decades. Better e-commerce websites than Amazon will curate away all the garbage and only show you the best things. At this point you can pretty much use the top 5 results from any Amazon search to rule out things NOT to buy.
>"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product ... Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?
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.
Amazon has turned the search ranking into a contest for who can give Jeff Bezos the most money. How is that an improvement on anything?
> Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?
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.
Good thing Godwin has never had to worry about writing the best book then. If it weren’t for internet marketing I doubt he’d have survived on the quality of his snake oil alone.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. This is no different than grocery stores selling shelf space. It is not at all like theft (morally wrong) or taxes (infamously inefficient). And if you don't do it, you go out of business since you aren't competitive with someone that does. It's sad that such obvious rage bait makes it to the top of hacker news.
What do you mean? I don't see how Amazon would go out of business if they show the best match for the thing you just searched for higher than the ads.
Really Amazon just has to overhaul their ratings system.
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.
An idea I've played around with in the past is to have some sort of law that limits how much revenue a company can make from ads. For example, a law that says "A company cannot make more than 10% of its gross revenue from ads or selling customer data".
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.
Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either.
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.
> The world would probably be a healthier place economically if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores and independent shops.
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?
Also prevents food deserts and other dark societal patterns.
I have never once heard someone try and claim Amazon is why food deserts exist...
"Your margins are my opportunity"
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.
I'm hoping AI will disintermediate most retail and we'll finally get an aggregator that isn't going to add a tax on both sides of the market.
"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right? I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to target a query, they'll eventually need to target a vector and its neighborhood, and there will be some greater opacity facing advertisers trying to match "middle-income US users shopping for airfryers who have product height limits posed by kitchen upper cabinets" or something.
Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.
I have no doubt this will work out even less well than your typical SEO marketing spam site in the offering the best choice for you. AIs recommendations will be those of the highest bidder. Which will also be the lowest quality product they can get away with.
Unfortunately, Cuisinart is that year’s official air fryer sponsor of ChatGPT so you’re getting that one!
and what stops the amazons of the world from paying the ai provider, and getting your ai to buy from them instead of the best deal? How are you going to check and verify you got the best deal?
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).
How much do you think the ai providers will take as a cut for that?
This is so true!
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.
In the product search results game, I imagine Google and Amazon will soon have competition from AI chatbots linking to product pages in response to user queries. Also, OpenAI is getting into ad business. Seems like that will add a different place where book publishers could run ads? They will also need to optimize their web pages to be useful to bots looking for information.
"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. 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 (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place)"
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.
Yes. Technically, there are situations where the air fryer which is best for you and the air fryer that makes Amazon the most money are the same. However, with the number of airfryers on Amazon it seems safe to assume this is a rare coincidence.
Counterpoint: Amazon among the most favorable institutions in the US
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP...
38% of people also think opposing fascism is very unfavourable according to that. Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
> Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
You’re talking about Amazon’s actual customers here. Is Amazon supposed to ignore the opinion of their customers for the opinion of some commenter on HN?
I'm having trouble understanding how this differs from traditional ads - even pre-Internet...? Didn't manufacturers pay to get premium shelf space in a store?
There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store.
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.
I'm sorry, but how does a business writer lead an article with garbage like this:
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.
The only reason I have Prime these days is for the unlimited photo storage and then some extra storage for video. It’s hard to find a convenient and cost effective way to free my data.
The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great.
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)
Prime is a waste of money. I find most stuff arrives in 2-3 days and its easy to spend the minimum to get free shipping.
I feel at least in major urban areas Amazon’s delivery network is efficient enough that they have to artificially delay non-Prime orders. I order from Amazon only occasionally, and while sometimes there’s actual step-by-step tracking I’ll usually see no movement at all for 3+ days, and suddenly the item has dispatched from the warehouse and it is reaching my house in an hour.
I've learned that I don't need anything in 2-3 days typically anyway.
Would love a similar post breaking down the rightmove (UK equivalent of zillow) tax. Fortunately there is currently a court case against them that might help. I am also starting a #RightmoveHygiene campaign to encourage people to spend less time on there.
Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases.
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?
Always best to search across Amazon, Ebay and Walmart. Vendors sell the same stuff across all three channels.
Amazon has no mercy, so neither do I.
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 would be pretty surprised if Amazon insures their package delivery. Do you have a source for them using insurance?
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.)
They don't "always believe this", this will lead to your account being banned eventually, or at least barred from returning products.
Not true.
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.
I certainly hope so. GP implies that they are committing fraud to "stick it to the man". Nine times out of ten, this simply results in the man sticking it to us again.
Amazon is not "the man".
They are for-profit corporation, not our government.
There's a difference.
Most likely they're sticking it to a delivery contractor. Amazon gets paid, you get your free stuff, and some working class stiff is peeing in a bottle driving a leased truck and not getting paid for their labor. Win win win, right?
You seriously believe the guy peeing in the bottle during deliveries is the one who eats the charge?
This isn't a restaurant and they're not waiters.
I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead
Ads too, I guess
I can recommend looking up Yanis Varoufakis and his Technofeudalism.
No wonder Amazon sued Perplexity to forbid agents on their site, agents could cut through the crap and find what users wanted instead of what Amazon peddles. They even won the suit.
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.
Has anyone found a useable fake review detector since Fakespot and Review Meta went down?
Maybe we need ad blockers for Amazon ads.
Principal agent problem combined with a monopoly, what could go wrong?
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.
Speak for yourself haha. Unconscious and unexamined behaviors hardly constitute a value system.
Unconscious values are still values.
I will just leave this here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
> And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else. In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
It’s very easy to blame systems and other people.
Whats going to be hilarious is if brick and mortar companies become popular again because of the painful U.I., scammy companies, and broken search of Amazon.
That's just not going to happen. You have to go out in the rain or heat, pay for parking, maybe not find what you want, pay 30% more than online, so online still has advantages.
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.
Must be some MBA thing. Must maximise revenue in every possible way. I have still no idea why the local white goods (and everything else) seller decided it was smart idea to pollute their own product search by becoming marketplace. I am going to you because well you are not that horrible and actually have store near me.
This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example.
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.
It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned.
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.
Yea, we really only need to enforce the laws and regulations on the books.
> What can we do about it? Not much.
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.
Usually I can purchase directly from the company that makes the product website.
Sometimes. Larger companies will not do that since it makes the places that sell most of their things mad to have to compete with the manufacture. (or sometimes they intentionally price such that others can undercut them).
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.
I don’t give Amazon my money, that’s something most people have the agency to do. There are many, many other places to order from on the internet.
The ads make sense in capitalism. Without the described effect products would never change. Payment for ads ensures discovery works in adversarial free market.
The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.
See also: ads for apps in app stores.
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.
Apple should really be ashamed of itself. But alas, corporations don't have shame, Steve would have been ashamed though.
App Store is a wasteland, I don't think there are more than 100 good apps in millions. All want in-app-purchase, none is fair to give me an upfront price. I don't want for example my kids being bugged to buy apps that cost $100/week.
cancelled our Prime membership a year ago (after nearly 10 years) and went from buying most non-food things on Amazon to occasionally buying small random items. We broke our addiction to 1 or 2-day shipping, and we're just fine.
Amazon has the most useless search I know. Also, idk who clicks those 'Sponsored' results, but for me they are an automatic pass. But then again Amazon is such a scumbag company that uses its own brands as a weapon to make sellers pay to be visible.
> It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
You take the money you would've spent on ads and instead offer a lower price than the current leader to make up for the buyer's uncertainty toward your product. This lets a search algorithm organically decide that you are among the top (risk-neutral) value contenders. Once that uncertainty disappears, you will have a higher value product and can therefore command a higher price.
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.
It's a nice idea and I can see it working in some cases.
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.
Then your product is actually worse for the customer. It's nice that you want it to be better, but it's not in a meaningful way that you can't just handwave away. Risk carries a cost.
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).
You're completely ignoring the fact that the majority of people do not expect a search result ranking to be influenced by bidding. Yes it happens, but unless the item is labeled as an ad, most people will infer value that does not exist. And this is wrong. The only reason they appear in the search is so that they do not look like ads. There's plenty of places to advertise and the best for the consumer is for transparency to exist in the first place.
The problem TFA is complaining about isn't ads in general, but specifically ads in Amazon search results for products sold on Amazon.
Amazon is a two-sided marketplace. Why should their obligation in search be 100% to one side?
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.
The article isn't an attack on advertising to bring awareness of your product to an unaware market; it's an attack on being made to pay for a customer who has specifically asked for your product to be shown your product.
Unless your _ads_ are going to compete with your competitors' then that's not going to be effective. Ironically middlemen are probably solution here, you'd be better off going to trade shows and working with department stores that sell air fryers, they'll want to turn your lower cost into their higher margin.
> People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
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.
I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."
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.
I have to agree with OP, this phrase specifically reveals it isn't a good take:
> 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.
So advertising entitles you to sales?
Of course not. A terrible product may not sell well even if it has great ads, for instance.
> advertise everywhere you want
Except, apparently, the surface that's actually closest to the purchasing decision? Why must that surface be forbidden?
The case is laid out pretty clearly in the article. Spend some time thinking about it.
right, you've spent most of your capital on product, and now you're competing with everyone else on $/ad.
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.
Say you invent a crap product, and shove ads under my nose to bug me while I want to buy a decent product. Why should I accept that?
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.
The problem is we aren’t in a world of more “reasonable” advertising. What we see deployed now are basically weapons-grade manipulation systems, and upstarts do not have equal access to the arsenal. So yeah, they need to get the word out, but they can’t even do that! The big dogs get better, more privileged access.
you sound like the kind of person who believes the best air fryer is the one that is advertised the most.
No, but I'd say it's slightly more likely than by chance (after all, success begets capital).
I actually prefer Dr. Pepper, but a lot of people think Coke makes the best cola, Apple makes the best laptops, etc.
Should Dr Pepper have to spend a dollar per purchase to be the top result when you search for "Dr Pepper"? Is it good for the customer that when they search Dr Pepper and they stopped paying for the placement ads the first page is no longer Dr Pepper but instead "UUBUOI SODA 100% SODA COLA POP" AND "FUUOYAY YUM YUM SPARKLE FIZZ 致癌神水"
Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.
Is this not the direct result of consumers being too lazy to price match and price discover? Amazon still has the ability to sort price: low to high. You also still have the ability to ask your friends and family what air fryer they purchased. If the average consumer just implicitly trusts Amazon such that they buy whatever shows up first, that’s not Amazon’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault.
I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.
> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
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.
The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions. They're employees of contract companies that put the Amazon logo on their vans.
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.
> The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions.
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.
He's not saying they get the $35K bonus.
Fair, but how easy is it to in that case mistakenly read it like that?
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.
I don't want to start 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.