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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
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a company, yes. As a customer experience, not really. At Walmart, I have to interact with employees who never seem happy to be there. A good quarter have no real reason to do more than minimum. I have to wait in line most times. Now, it has been over 5 years since I've had a walmart in the same country as I am, but I remember the horribleness of 2am walmart, mostly because they would only open one or two registers…
To be honest, with the growth of self-checkout at Walmart the times I actually interact with a Walmart employee directly is now probably close to 30%.
They didn't have them at Wal-mart last time I lived around one - around 5 years ago. I use those in every store that has them, though, so long as possible (I can't if I'm using cash).
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#373Their 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…
The one place where Walmart has Amazon crushed is a physical presence which drastically affects shipping. Instead of having to buy Prime to get 2 day free shipping, I can just shop at Walmart and anything I buy gets delivered to a local Walmart 5 minutes away for free so I can pick it up. Most of the time it's 2-3 days (sometimes same day if they have it locally). This bypasses the $25-35 minimum price rule for free…
I bought a book on Amazon. I don't have Prime, so it took most of a week before the third party seller even shipped it. It never arrived, and the order status only said "left shipper facility". After staying in this limbo for several days past the arrival date, I was credited with a refund.
I bought the book again, this time fulfilling through Amazon. They quoted an arrival date of a week in the future. When that day arrived, the package had not arrived and it turned out that the date was changed to the shipping date. I still had to wait the better part of the week for the book to actually arrive.
I did a search and found that I could have bought the book directly from the author (self-published), and would have arrived in three or four days.
While waiting for the book to arrive the second time, I decided I had another book I wanted to read. I had it loaded up on Amazon... then checked B&N, who had the book in stock. I cancelled the Amazon order, and drove 10 minutes to buy the second book.
So much for the convenience of Amazon...
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#374Their 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…
> . the cat litter I just purchased is $17.89 at Amazon, $13.49 at Walmart. Isn't extra $4 for shipping? You are comparing store pickup to something shipped to your home.
No. I was comparing to Walmart.com.
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Speaking as a longtime customer, I agree: this is what Amazon's behavior feels like to me nowadays. Search no longer works well for me. Reviews and product ratings are no longer trustworthy. The authenticity of products in key categories (e.g., electronics) can no longer be taken for gra…
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…
No, the issue they should care about is that I'm losing trust in them, for a number of reasons, and (anecdatally) I'm not the only one.
- Are they taking me for a ride on price? I don't optimize this enough and do overpay because I'm lazy, but there have been multiple times lately that they gave me a price that was just stupidly high.
- Is this the kind of product that will cause their screwed-up warehousing system to stiff me with counterfeit goods/seconds? No way in hell am I going to put up with that kind of shitty bait-and-switch, and this cuts out a huge swath of categories I'll consider from them.
- Did I find all the places on the page where they hide alternate (cheaper) sellers in their own store?
And this is also after I mostly stopped using their incredibly loosely-matching search and just use DDG, which works much better.
At a certain point, I find the friction of keeping them honest is not worth it. Last renewal time, Prime was still worth it. When it is up for renewal I'm cancelling to see if I miss it.
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#376Earlier 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.
Counterfeit problem? Stop co-mingling inventory - then you can track what inventory went to which customer and easily peg down which sources are selling counterfeits by looking at the reviews.
Amazon co-mingles different retailer's inventory when amazon handle fulfillment for them?!?!? Are you sure? That's insane.
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#377I might actually be done with Amazon. Every few months, I spend some time searching for the perfect LED light bulbs for my apartment; the built-in fixture requires 6 candelabra-base bulbs. These are hard to find, but there are a few products catering to this market, so I randomly buy stuff to see if I ever get anything good. I found some LEDs that claimed to have a high CRI and were brighter than normal, so I took a…
I haven't ordered anything off of Amazon in a while, and before I do I check other places. I used to not do that, when Amazon was a younger company I bought things from there without much shopping around. I've had problems with counterfeits from Amazon in the past. The problem is that Amazon makes it so seamless to buy something. It's a bit of a hassle to use someone else. I end up always using my PayPal account so I don't have to sign in to all these other outlets.
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#378I might actually be done with Amazon. Every few months, I spend some time searching for the perfect LED light bulbs for my apartment; the built-in fixture requires 6 candelabra-base bulbs. These are hard to find, but there are a few products catering to this market, so I randomly buy stuff to see if I ever get anything good. I found some LEDs that claimed to have a high CRI and were brighter than normal, so I took a…
I've started just buying my LEDs at Home Depot or Lowes. At least I know they're not counterfeit.
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Speaking as a longtime customer, I agree: this is what Amazon's behavior feels like to me nowadays. Search no longer works well for me. Reviews and product ratings are no longer trustworthy. The authenticity of products in key categories (e.g., electronics) can no longer be taken for gra…
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) When profit margins increase efficiencies decline. While their profit margins were low, you can imagine they spent a lot of time optimizing processes to remain solvent. This is an ongoing process, and when profit margins go up these kinds of processes are often neglected.
2) This is true, but where Amazon excels in market efficiency for the general case, they lack in supporting niches; especially high priced niches.
For instance, I just purchased a $2600 (+$30 2-day shipping) lens from B&H photo, despite the fact that I have a Prime account, and the price on Amazon was the same.
This is because, while I still trust Amazon for smaller purchases, I no longer trust them for expensive niche products like camera gear or computers, since their supply chain is out of control (Chinese knock-offs, etc.).
3) Sure they’ve made a few billion dollars in profit, but their opex is enormous. Compare this to Apple, who’s cash and equivalence is enough to run without sales for a decade. Given a downturn in the economy and a pullback in consumer spending (not to mention a drop in AWS revenue), Amazon could get into financial trouble pretty quickly.
Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads
#380I might actually be done with Amazon. Every few months, I spend some time searching for the perfect LED light bulbs for my apartment; the built-in fixture requires 6 candelabra-base bulbs. These are hard to find, but there are a few products catering to this market, so I randomly buy stuff to see if I ever get anything good. I found some LEDs that claimed to have a high CRI and were brighter than normal, so I took a…
Seems to be the way forward. TripAdvisor recently sent me a message that hotel X remodeled and this they deleted all (?) old reviews. I'm sure the hotel paid a nice sum for that, from seeing the new reviews not much has changed...