Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 564 posts

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#181

Post by kd5bjo »

arbuge wrote: post #19

Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Now that they've captured 50%+ of US ecommerce, they've also raised many prices, to the point where they're far from the cheapest price in many cases. A random example... the cat litter I just purchased is $17.89 at Amazon, $13.49 at Walmart. Last week I bought a chair mat for $21.95 on Eb…

Walmart has a history making suppliers cut costs to the point that quality has to drop. Often, suppliers will produce inferior goods for Walmart, and mark them the same as the high-quality goods they sell to other retailers.

I've actually wondered how many of Amazon's "counterfeit" items are genuine Walmart-class products commingled with Macy's-class products in Amazon's warehouses.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#182

Post by mattmg83 »

bhtru wrote: post #171
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a solved problem and not hard. Most brick and mortar chains in the UK have a buying policy that requires you to prove your goods are fit for purpose before they'll put it on the shelves and risk hurting their brand. I imagine most of Europe operates similarly. They will generally require suppliers to send examples of the range before being allowed in store, and they will test or examine a representative selectio…

Couldn’t malicious sellers circumvent this by sending quality product initially and then swapping it later on?

The entire TIC industry (I work for Underwriters Laboratories) does just that, we independently test and certify and then audit the factories to make sure it’s still made the same way as the original sample. Problem is... people counterfeit our certificates, and some retailers don’t care much

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#183

Post by bradleybuda »

philipov wrote: post #176
arbuge wrote: post #19

Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Now that they've captured 50%+ of US ecommerce, they've also raised many prices, to the point where they're far from the cheapest price in many cases. A random example... the cat litter I just purchased is $17.89 at Amazon, $13.49 at Walmart. Last week I bought a chair mat for $21.95 on Eb…

> Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Sounds like an antitrust issue. Great example of how it doesn't take full monopoly-scale control for markets to break down.

Maybe Amazon is behaving badly, trying to scam customers by selling them fraud products at inflated prices. Is the best response to that to enlist the federal government to make them run their business differently? Or may we could just, you know, take our business elsewhere?

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#184

Post by beaconstudios »

na85 wrote: post #160
etatoby wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. Why are so many people willing to throw away the baby (capitalism) with the dirty bathwater (monopolies and others crony deviations.)

To use your analogy, it's not clear to me that one can have the baby without it spoiling the bathwater.

you don't think people exchanging goods and services using money as an intermediate exchange (aka capitalism) can be a net-positive? Because any other aspect of our current formation of capitalism is negotiable. We can regulate to counteract negative corporate behaviours (though that has its own set of issues) so that companies are working for the benefit of the populace.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#185

Post by tmaly »

ryanianian wrote: post #170
apersona wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems? It seems like a hard problem - eBay suffered from this too for their goods,Yelp with reviews. I doubt it's just a "I don't care" kind of thing.

It's pretty easy to spot fake reviews. The tacticts are pretty obvious. I'd bet basic NLP and pattern-matching would work to catch a huge percentage of fake-reviews if it were something Amazon really cared about doing. Is the reviewer saying things of substance, how many other reviews have they left and over how many years, how many things have they actually bought on the store and at what dollar amounts, are their o…

fakespot.com does this for you. Just paste in the URL for the amazon product and it will analyze the reviews.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#186

Post by NeedMoreTea »

bhtru wrote: post #171
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a solved problem and not hard. Most brick and mortar chains in the UK have a buying policy that requires you to prove your goods are fit for purpose before they'll put it on the shelves and risk hurting their brand. I imagine most of Europe operates similarly. They will generally require suppliers to send examples of the range before being allowed in store, and they will test or examine a representative selectio…

Couldn’t malicious sellers circumvent this by sending quality product initially and then swapping it later on?

Sure they could, but with a proper approach to supply management, like the whole of the traditional sector is used to it gets caught. The lower quality switch would get caught in the random checks of incoming product in your first years as supplier, or rapidly from customer feedback. Then simply drop them as supplier.

Amazon would look far far better to their customers if they started cutting some of the crap as "not good enough to go in Amazon" and dropping suppliers for shoddy manufacture or too high a return rate.

There is a big difference between cheap, good value and all the world's unfit for purpose and counterfeit crap, for me anyway. They can pretend marketplace is separate, and outsource returns and customer service to marketplace sellers all they like. If I buy something dangerous or shit on marketplace I resent Amazon as much as the RNGFake4u brand I accidentally bought.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#187

Post by tmaly »

arbuge wrote: post #19

Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Now that they've captured 50%+ of US ecommerce, they've also raised many prices, to the point where they're far from the cheapest price in many cases. A random example... the cat litter I just purchased is $17.89 at Amazon, $13.49 at Walmart. Last week I bought a chair mat for $21.95 on Eb…

If you have a baby, the prices are even more pronounced. Even 5 years ago, diapers on Amazon were way too much. Costco shines in this segment.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#188

Post by taeric »

ckastner wrote: post #139
apersona wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems? It seems like a hard problem - eBay suffered from this too for their goods,Yelp with reviews. I doubt it's just a "I don't care" kind of thing.

> How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems? No idea what do to about the reviews, but the first step to the counterfeit goods problem is simple: once you've received X complaints about a counterfeit product, stop selling the product . Continuing to sell a product for which there are numerous and credible indications that they are counterfeit is borderline…

Have you established that there are "numerous and credible indications" for all counterfeit products? I would, perhaps naively, think that this is just shifting the exact same problem to the reports.

That is, reviews and reports are likely easier to manipulate/game than physical products. Not just in "ballet stuffing" but through many other means. (That is, it is probably easy to get credible people to also vouch for products while you are shipping counterfeit ones.)

To that end, I'd imagine it is easy to get rid of someone that sells 100% fake items. But how hard is it to drop someone that sells 10% fake items? In bulk, that is still damaging. And is still probably lucrative for the seller.

Basically, I'd expect (again, perhaps naively) that painting it as a boolean trip actually makes it easier for the cheaters.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#189

Post by dymk »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #118
nabla9 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect customer retention is not their goal. If selling 100 for $70 gives $7000 in revenue and selling 70 for $100 gives $7000 in revenue and the inverse relationship is linear, they should sell 85 for $85 and get $7225 in revenue. They have created solid economies of scale that others can't match. Together with the massive amount of customer data they are in a position where they can optimize their prices and respo…

So essentially price gouging. What a great business model.

Optimizing revenue given a particular supply and demand isn't price gouging. People are paying for the convenience of buying anything they want with two clicks from their computer chair, turns out that's pretty valuable.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#190

Post by quxbar »

maxxxxx wrote: post #18
Loughla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>now they're just an eBay clone selling cheap knockoffs trying to hide the fact. I've moved almost all of my online purchases BACK to ebay actually because of this. At least ebay's trust system is easy to understand and harder to game than what amazon has in terms of reviews. I'm interested to see if this is a trend, or if my circle of friends is an outlier.

Same here. I either go to eBay or B&H. In eBay I can see at least quickly the seller rating. Amazon has just turned into a big mess.

Just so you know, B&H was years ahead of Amazon on warehouse worker abuse: http://www.boycottbnh.com/#a11y-abuse

Any tips for buying on eBay?

Post reply on HN