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Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

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Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#321

Post by yayadarsh »

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…

Love the ReviewMeta (website or chrome extension) for exactly this. It gives a computed "true score" based on some of the dimensions you mention above. (I am not in any way affiliated with this product)

https://reviewmeta.com/

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#322

Post by jdeibele »

awaywopassd wrote: post #272
eganist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies in advance for the self-referential commentary: I've put down a long list of reasons for why I've cancelled prime after almost ten years of consistent use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16937290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17568320 If you-the-reader need good reasons to quit prime, I hope these help.

I am also not about to renew my Prime membership. You list gave me a lot of confidence. But one of important benefit I use Prime for is Amazon Photos. Unlimited backup of your photos. When I look at other solutions such as Backblaze, they will all cost at least $50 a year. Then another benefit I like is Prime Music. Which again is going to cost money if I get music subscription from Spotify or somewhere else. So when…

You can substitute Google Photos for Amazon Photos. I have several Google accounts that have soccer photos, family photos, etc. I want to keep pictures of other people's kids from trying to be recognized as my own. And the family photos account can be be given to someone else to control without giving access to my email. You get 15G of storage with unaltered originals, unlimited if you let them compress.

If you set up a separate account, you probably don't have to worry about hitting the 15G limit unless you have many, many photos or are taking them at very, very high resolution.

We pay for family subscriptions to Google Play Music and Spotify. My wife and kids listen to music on our Google Home device and they do a lot of Youtube. I didn't want to do Spotify, too, but the older two asked for Spotify for Christmas because of the playlists only available there. $14.99/month x 2.

I was a devoted Google Reader user and I don't trust Google very much to keep things around. But it's easy to share the links with family and let them download the photos to their own storage.

I was also using Amazon storage to backup when they stopped doing the free backup storage, cutting it to 5GB (I think) for free. So I don't trust them, either.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#323

Post by DoubleCribble »

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…

You're not taking into consideration the fact that Amazon prices fluctuate rapidly, sometimes daily (hourly?). You can still find good deals on Amazon, you just need to get lucky and/or be patient with their pricing algorithm. Using a third party website like camelcamelcamel.com can help you see if you are really getting the "best price" that Amazon offers.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#324

Post by kaitai »

NegativeK wrote: post #248
Gustomaximus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it though? 1) The day Amazon feel threatened they can become the cheapest in the market quickly again. 2) Given purchasing power scale and people like fast delivery there will only be a handful of companies that can complete with Amazon ever, so it seems unlikely there will be a 'started in the garage' business compete with them now the market is maturing. 3) With the extra profit Amazon are making vs a competit…

As a sibling comment pointed out, cheapest doesn't trump everything -- otherwise we'd be ordering from Aliexpress. I've spend _way_ too much money on climbing gear in the past three years, very little of which was on Amazon. I simply can't risk getting counterfeit safety-critical goods. And while I'm not worried about counterfeit mops, I have noticed that the Amazon first habit is now broken in general.

Small but significant: I don't buy diapers from Amazon anymore, after so many reports of counterfeits. Target has my dollars. (Certainly a different kind of safety-critical!)

The supply chain problems are very worrisome for Amazon.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#325

Post by j-c-hewitt »

Alupis wrote: post #317
Gustomaximus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it though? 1) The day Amazon feel threatened they can become the cheapest in the market quickly again. 2) Given purchasing power scale and people like fast delivery there will only be a handful of companies that can complete with Amazon ever, so it seems unlikely there will be a 'started in the garage' business compete with them now the market is maturing. 3) With the extra profit Amazon are making vs a competit…

> 1) The day Amazon feel threatened they can become the cheapest in the market quickly again. I don't think that's necessarily true. Majority of products sold on Amazon are sold by 3rd parties. Amazon's commission fee structure, and seller-eats-return-shipping-by-default is to blame for prices going up on many items... Competition among sellers is fierce on Amazon - and historically was a race to the bottom, chasing…

They could reduce fees and cut ad prices. That does have a big impact. They can also offer better deals to brands. They tend to offer really crap deals to brands on the vendor side, but they could easily just give them more margin.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#326

Post by sandworm101 »

kmano8 wrote: post #318
sandworm101 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you may not be charged the tax but you probable still have a legal obligation to pay it. That you choose not to to fill out all the forms is on you. Each state and country is different in how they treat online sales re local taxes.

Sure. I'd be curious to see some data on who actually follows through on this. Pushing the burden to the consumer to document these transactions doesn't make any sense to me. Additionally, I bet many consumers don't even realize when taxes haven't been paid during checkout.

It isn't anything new. When you order something from another jurisdiction you aren't a simple consumer. You are an importer, subject to all the rule of any other importer. Amazon just implements what everyone was supposed to be doing already.

Allow online sales to occur without sales tax and one day nobody will ever pay sales tax. Every transaction could be structured in terms of online order and local delivery. Starbucks could let you order coffee online, then pick it up at the counter. This is why states are moving on this issue now. Amazon is just the first to implement it on their side of the transaction.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#327

Post by Alupis »

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #325
Alupis wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) The day Amazon feel threatened they can become the cheapest in the market quickly again. I don't think that's necessarily true. Majority of products sold on Amazon are sold by 3rd parties. Amazon's commission fee structure, and seller-eats-return-shipping-by-default is to blame for prices going up on many items... Competition among sellers is fierce on Amazon - and historically was a race to the bottom, chasing…

They could reduce fees and cut ad prices. That does have a big impact. They can also offer better deals to brands. They tend to offer really crap deals to brands on the vendor side, but they could easily just give them more margin.

If you're referring to Vendor Central, I've no idea since we've not participated in that yet.

Cutting fees and slashing ad prices would be a start - but it would take a while before people trust it.

We got into FBA heavily because it dramatically boosted sales... even on products we co-listed FBM on (nuts, you pay more to fulfill it via Amazon's network, but they boost your sales, so it washed out).

Recently, they've been increasing FBA fees to where it's finally at the point we're re-examining it's profitability and possibly moving back to FBM for 100% of our items. But... not everyone has the luxury of having their own warehouse and fulfillment infrastructure - a lot of Amazon sellers are vested 100% into FBA and are at Amazon's mercy with fees.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#328

Post by mindcrime »

wolco wrote: post #303
mindcrime wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody "conspires to advance their own interests"... that's pretty much the definition of self-interest. Anyway, the point is just that one doesn't expect companies to be your friend. You expect them to pursue their own interest, and thankfully their interest and your interest overlap quite often - and mutual, voluntary exchange of goods, service, and currency occurs. Are there things I wish Amazon, for example, d…

You think your interests overlap. They have been carefully presented this way to extract maximum value from you over the long term.

If a transaction weren't in my interest, I wouldn't engage in it. And value isn't being extracted when parties engage in voluntary trade, it's being created.

Note that this is not to say that I (or anybody else) engages in strict, robot-like, mathematical optimization of all transactions to ensure that our best interest is served down to the .00000000000001th place. We, as human beings, employ satisficing[1] for a lot of our decision making. But the fact that I buy from Amazon when I could save 50 cents by buying from Walmart instead, or that I tolerate Amazon showing me a few ads when I'm shopping, is neither here nor there.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#329

Post by scrooched_moose »

astura wrote: post #252
scrooched_moose wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to completely stop using Amazon if you dump Prime though. I still place occasional orders, but I just have to get to $25 for the standard free shipping. In my area, things take about 4 days without Prime - 2 extra "processing" days and 2 days to ship.

Or you can pay for two day shipping if you really need it rather than paying up front all at once.

It's painful though, and seems to heavily incentivize "I guess I'll just pay the $12.99/month for Prime again".

I just tried 5 different sub-$25 items. 2 day shipping was only offered on 3 of them, and varied between $7.99 and $11.44. One day shipping was offered on all of them, but was between $9.99 and $18.89.

There are some weird stacking effects on the 2 day shipping option as well - it's not a flat rate or per item rate, but falls somewhere in the middle. It's definitely more expensive the more items you have though.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#330

Post by throwaway2048 »

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?

They risk future sales if they do that.
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