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Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

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Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#51

Post by Vespasian »

dclusin wrote: post #36
echelon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars. 2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up. 3…

I disagree with the implicit assumption that llms can’t be gamed. There’s simply too much money to be made for that to remain true.

Yeah it's still too early for us to know for sure but I'd expect LLMs getting pretty bad pretty quick.

Once ads are added there is, again, a motivation to make replies very long and rambly. Even now I begin getting "annoyed":

Yes it's grammatically correct and "humanly" sounding but all I really want is five dashes with ingredients and instructions for an apple pie.

Given enough time, I'm confident the "Certainly I can help you. Here's what you need to..." will once again turn into a paragraph or two to have more opportunities to sell to advertisers.

The economics still don't seem to favor brief responses.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#52

Post by Regnore »

prawn wrote: post #14

I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist. I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-r…

I assumed that this is a legal requirement for all big online stores - is that not the case?

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#53

Post by Regnore »

scarface74 wrote: post #10
cheeselip420 wrote: post #6

So the companies that sell on Amazon pay money to Amazon (from the revenues they get from Amazon's customers) to have their products listed more favorably than competitors (one of which is actually Amazon). I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...

Or the same thing every company in retail has done forever

How many options are there for retail?

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#54

Post by Regnore »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #13
cheeselip420 wrote: post #6

So the companies that sell on Amazon pay money to Amazon (from the revenues they get from Amazon's customers) to have their products listed more favorably than competitors (one of which is actually Amazon). I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/requirements-getting-product... "You may be required to pay a slotting fee to, in effect, purchase shelf space if there is a great deal of competition fighting for the same space." no difference than paying for shelf space.

The difference is that there are many stores to negotiate with for shelf space - in the online world there is only one serious player (although this does seem to be changing over time)

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#55

Post by Semaphor »

mym1990 wrote: post #46
Semaphor wrote: post #31

I went to Amazon without an ad blocker for the first time yesterday (wanted to try the fakespot service, but it requires an extension and "access all" so I created a clean profile for it). I was surprised how many ads there were on Amazon, I thought the situation was already bad with an ad blocker, considering they show a lot of hard-coded ads, but wow.

I am generally getting overwhelmed with ads coming from every nook and cranny of life to the point that I don't even want to buy stuff anymore, for a lot of it its like: whats the point?

Luckily, I mostly don’t see any ads. Only for work, and on Amazon pretty much. Some more as product placement and in the physical world, but not a ton.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#56

Post by flangola7 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #39
mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly agree. Dropped prime after I Amazon adds mean I couldn't find what I wanted. Now use google to find specific stuff on D2C websites (probably Shopify) and spend less. It's great!

I dropped prime after "two-day shipping on all orders" had degenerated into "we'll deliver it when we feel like it, and you can't get two-day shipping even if you're willing to pay extra for it".

What even is Prime without faster shipping?

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#57

Post by ankit219 »

> the ‘retail media’ gold rush: the realisation that a high-traffic website or app could be ad inventory even if you’re not a media company, that you have very relevant ‘consented’ first party data (at the very least intent if not broader profiles) and probably purchase attribution too, that all of this now has more relative value given the push against cookies and third party data everywhere else - and that advertising margins are a lot higher than retail margins.

I think it's not visitors, but repeat users which makes it possible and so valuable. This is going to be the next phase of Adtech. Uber has a $500M run rate from ads, Walmart has $2.7B (from the same article), and evidently more and more companies will discover, if you can aggregate traffic to some decent level, you can monetize it with first party data. This advantage is only going to increase once we see Android launch their own version of tracking consent, and Chrome gets rid of cookies. A good horizontal play here is to sell targeting, attribution, and profiling services to all these "aggregators of traffic".

Not sure about the revenues per se, but I think Doordash, Expedia, Robinhood, Airbnb could also potentially generate ad revenue at low cost just based how much traffic (and repeat users) they get

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#58

Post by peanuty1 »

prawn wrote: post #14

I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist. I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-r…

> I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website.

Best Buy and Walmart do this too (allowing third-parties to list products on their website).

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#59

Post by peanuty1 »

tyoma wrote: post #19
scarface74 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the same thing every company in retail has done forever

Remember when Amazon listed private label brands, like every retailer has done for decades if not longer, and there was a collective freak out?

I think the freak-out was that Amazon was leveraging its data to create copycat products.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#60

Post by emodendroket »

prawn wrote: post #14

I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist. I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-r…

At this point it might be faster to list off the major retailers who do not do this.
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