Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #153

pixelpoet wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel there's an argument to be made for Amazon having a near-monopoly on online sales and distribution in many countries, even outside America. They've simply nailed it and scaled it. In New Zealand a company called TradeMe got there first and successfully fended off Amazon, but that's a minority case. There are pros (e.g. consumers love it) and cons (e.g. human toll when optimising efficiency without robots) to ha…

We are so early in the shift to online retailing. People using Amazon for stuff other than books, DVDs, and CDs only became a thing in the last 10 years. Walmart has barely started to get their shit together with online retailing. Same for the major supermarket chains. They have an incredible physical presence with huge transaction volume that they can leverage into their online efforts.

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

pixelpoet wrote: post #140

ANTITRUST! If Microsoft can get hammered for packaging Internet Explorer with Windows (and probably rightly so, given the market conditions at the time), there is a direct analogy to be made here. Pick what you want to be: if you want to be the greatest goods index and shipment company in the world, fantastic. But you have to accept that you cannot sneak some of your own other-products to the top using that power. In…

Post by partialrecall » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #163

partialrecall wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about Amazon Basics, but with Amazon's Choice products they're plainly not evaluating products before selecting them. LockpickingLawyer on youtube has done reviews on several Amazon's Choice locks and safes and they've all been abysmal borderline fraudulent products.

Those two programs have nothing to do with each other.

Post by zip1234 » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

jastanton wrote: post #56

password1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English. It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US/EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It's the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US/EU. It's exactly the same thing that Amazon does with it…

The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.

Post by Pxtl » Mon, Sep 16, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

momokoko wrote: post #104

Pxtl wrote: post #34

Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it's their own name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer. Obviously it's grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it's an improvement. Otherwise, Amazon feels l…

At this point, anecdotally, it feels as though the top comment on almost every article I see on HN about Amazon is some variation of this complaint. Has anyone done any analysis on the HN posting dataset to see if that happens to be the case? And if that is the case, does anyone have any insight into why that might be?