101–110 of 159 posts
>Sellers can use “Fulfillment by Amazon,” so Amazon handles storage and shipping of its products through its vast logistics network. But Amazon also charges for that privilege. We used to call this kind of activity a ‘service’ but apparently it’s now called a ‘privilege’
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I get free shipping from Walmart.com and AliExpress, the latter of which 90% of electronics on Amazon are sourced from. Walmart offers free 2 day shipping and in-store pickup. AliExpress offers the same items on Amazon without having to give middleman their expensive cut. I don't trust Amazon not to send me fake items or cheap Chinese knockoffs. There is absolutely no quality control on Amazon's end. Amazon has the r…
> Amazon has the resources to fight fake reviews, yet fake reviews are still rampant. As a result, I cannot trust Amazon's rating system at all. While this is true, at least the part about fake reviews being pervasive, the fact is that I don't trust any reviews on a retailer's website anymore, especially those that aren't verified purchases, and the only retail site where I trust verified purchase reviews at all (and…
I feel like this is a dramatic market development. In the era of brick-and-mortar shops, a lot of those products were only available as branded versions. Think when you had to go in to a store and get a printer cable in 2001, and you were paying $25 for a Belkin cable in a fancy box because it's all they sell.
Branding from a consumer perspective is about building a message of "we're the quality one you know and trust" or "we're the cool/desirable one you recognize." It isn't necessary for a lot of these products: they're not sexy and the bar of competence is so low that you're unlikely to be burned.
AliExpress and friends have completely reinvented that market by tapping into that sentiment. Their products are unbranded (or as-good-as-unbranded, with a name with no meaning to the buyer) but trade on cheap and good enough. I'm sure a lot of the bits-and-bobs industry is up all night sweating.
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Amazon seems to think that I’m a real vacuum aficionado/collector as well. It’s quite possible that those are still the best items to recommend to us, to mop up any “unhappy with the one they got, so save them with a return/rebuy” sales.
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual reason was they are capturing extra sales from people who bought something, liked it a lot, and then bought another to give to their kids or for their second home. My mom buys me random chotchkies all the time after she bought them and liked them, and if my parents were well off I could easily see her buying me a vacuum or a new mattress after she got herself one. For 99% of peop…
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Because ad click through rates are so low and the signal is so incredibly sparse. It's all measured against a test set which the researchers rarely look at directly (because the data set is so large). So if something lifts ad vlicks by 1% and that's from 100 in 10k to 101 in 10k, they don't really care if 9k of the ads get appreciably dumber.
Sure, but if you buy a rice cooker, maybe the ads to show you are for: rice, cookbooks (featuring lots of rice?), pressure cookers, cast iron pans, sous vide recirculators, and so on. I mean, you have a rice cooker, you won't want another, but chances are you'd buy other things you don't already have.
One thing to keep in mind is that the purchase data is per-user, so it's different from the segment approach I was mentioning above. It would require a whole new schema* that is queried whenever bids are processed for an ad event.
* Sorry for using the word schema here. It was used a lot on a team I was on in a similar context, and it bothered me at first but I got used to it. What I mean by schema is a "blob" with purchase data that is periodically processed by the bidding subsystem to add bid exclusions per user.
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Can you explain why you feel that it's unethical? That's not something I've ever thought to consider one way or the other.
I think that loss leading leads to device or producer lock in (as it's intended to) and limited the utility of devices for frivolous reasons - if your nuclear reactor specifically requires rods with little notches at the end feel free to warn and protect against incompatible notches, but if that notch requirement was to lock the consumer into your Atomizer Brand Rods(R) then you may force a consumer into making fisca…
When I think of "loss leader" I think of the Thrifty pharmacies that used to have an ice-cream counter. People went in for a 35-cent cone and ended up buying $10 of other merchandise that more than made up for the 15 cents Thrifty lost on the cone.
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Sure, but if you buy a rice cooker, maybe the ads to show you are for: rice, cookbooks (featuring lots of rice?), pressure cookers, cast iron pans, sous vide recirculators, and so on. I mean, you have a rice cooker, you won't want another, but chances are you'd buy other things you don't already have.
What is the ratio between people who viewed a rice cooker (the group I'm assuming they target with ads) vs. those who actually bought a rice cooker? Is it possible the ratio is so large to where while it obviously could be optimized to exclude people who have since purchased said item - the optimization is only a rounding error, and may not turn out to be worth it?
The claim repeatedly and misleadingly made in the article that Amazon doesn't post a profit is easily debunked by the fact that they're a publicly traded company that legally has to have it profits made publicly available. They make a profit. They have for a long time. It goes up and it goes down as they expand and reinvest, but they're definitely not intentionally taking a loss.
And they have to have their accounting methods and control systems used to be audited by an independent third party annually to ensure compliance with generally accepted accounting principles. As far as I'm aware, they've never had an adverse opinion issued against them. The whole point of making public companies undergo an audit every single year is to make sure they're doing any shenanigans that make their annual statements in some way not comparable to the financial statements of other companies in that industry.
It's incredibly annoying to see an article like this get shared because it's incredibly obvious the author doesn't know what the heck he's talking about, but just enough to fool readers into thinking he does.
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Because ad click through rates are so low and the signal is so incredibly sparse. It's all measured against a test set which the researchers rarely look at directly (because the data set is so large). So if something lifts ad vlicks by 1% and that's from 100 in 10k to 101 in 10k, they don't really care if 9k of the ads get appreciably dumber.
Sure, but if you buy a rice cooker, maybe the ads to show you are for: rice, cookbooks (featuring lots of rice?), pressure cookers, cast iron pans, sous vide recirculators, and so on. I mean, you have a rice cooker, you won't want another, but chances are you'd buy other things you don't already have.
I've done similar things a lot, in this case it was because the first cooker had too large a minimum cooking amount. I'm currently looking at buying my mother google WiFi - which I bought a few weeks ago. And a few months back I rebought a tool I had just purchased because I lost it.
I currently work for a (responsible) own site adtech (personalization) company. Its surprising what behaviours our clients find profitable for their business.
Amazon has a team called "Amazon Profitability Group". I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly. The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the "discount" to vendors, and the items to put in the "buy box" in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn't doing something as simplistic as…
IIRC, there was a science fiction story where a supercomputer that humanity used for efficient logistics took over the world simply by changing the orders and sending things to the appropriate places. Can't remember the book, but might have been by Heinlein or Clarke... Seems like the Amazon AWS servers could do that quite nicely if they were sentient... or just had enough data.