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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

#231

Post by nickff »

animal_spirits wrote: post #221
skizm wrote: post #208

Buying things these days: Go to amazon search for product. Find something that looks reasonable. Confirm review section has a reasonable distribution of stars and check out a few 1 and 3/4 star reviews (hope they're written by a human) and see if there are any deal breakers. Go to google and enter " reddit reviews". Go to reddit read reviews and hope they're not written by astroturf accounts, bots, or chatgpt (have t…

Something I heard recently on the cortex podcast is that Amazon is changing customer's understanding of how shipping works. While it is easy to set up a direct to consumer platform for a shop to sell their own goods, the shipping costs surprise the users because they are used to free shipping through Amazon.

Amazon is extremely organized (in terms of stock and shipping) and quite good at logistics, so it's very difficult to compete against them on that basis.

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

#232

Post by freejazz »

Zetice wrote: post #228
freejazz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is more than an online retailer... Amazon sells ads on its marketplace. It also sells ads that integrate within its marketplace listings in a fashion that can be difficult to discern. It offers a fulfillment service that is integrated with its marketplace. It offers an integrated third party marketplace. These, are of course, facts. Whereas my initial response to was just the hypothetical point that you misund…

So… walmart.com? You can use outrage if you want, but the fact remains that Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly, not in the legal sense and not in any layperson sense. You’re kind of proving my point for me, that there’s no actual argument here, just general negative sentiment.

I didn't express negative sentiment, I listed a number of facts that distinguish Amazon from Walmart.

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

#234

Post by Loughla »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #233

When you walk in your local grocery store and see a Pepsi display with a football player or something and a big stack of Pepsi products right there how do you all think that happens?

This thread is showing me that a shocking number of people have never considered that the layout of the stores they shop in are not either arbitrary or necessarily based on what's best for the customer.

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

#235

Post by Zetice »

freejazz wrote: post #232
Zetice wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So… walmart.com? You can use outrage if you want, but the fact remains that Amazon has nothing even approaching a monopoly, not in the legal sense and not in any layperson sense. You’re kind of proving my point for me, that there’s no actual argument here, just general negative sentiment.

I didn't express negative sentiment, I listed a number of facts that distinguish Amazon from Walmart.

None of those facts do that, as Walmart offers everything you listed.

I just happen to live in AR and know a number of people who work on the relevant teams that do each of these things at Walmart, and given Walmart.com's growth in the last year, Amazon is far from the only company able to provide these services profitably.

Is Amazon a competitor? Yes. Do they have a monopoly? Heck no.

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

#236

Post by anonymous344 »

what this slotting fee does, is the same as one induvidual would own all the city buildings in a small city - price of rent goes up up up, price of products go up up up, and then its just empty, everyb goes shopping somewhere else.

i never buy these products because u know its a scam of 800% margin. there are no products anymore that are decent priced. it all like thai taxi mafia

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

#237

Post by disantlor »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #230
bradleyjg wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve reduced my usage of Amazon significantly since they made it near impossible to filter out 3rd party sellers. I have no interest in eBay 2.0.

Agreed, the only thing I buy from them anymore are books because I know what I'm getting (that said, trying out Bookshop to support local bookstores but they're often more expensive)

that price difference is being externalized somehow, so, if it's possible (and of course it's not for everyone) it's best to just pay the higher price imo. it's better for society and the neighborhood

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

#238

Post by cronix »

Marsymars wrote: post #216
input_sh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sponsored segments on YouTube. Billboards. Sponsored texts in newspapers. "YC XXX is hiring" on HN. I use Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsorblock and a few others. Ads are still everywhere. Not as everywhere as they'd be without it, but it's not like adblocks get rid of them all together.

Whenever a politician or volunteer contacts me, I tell them my #1 issue is banning billboards, or at least putting it up as a ballot measure / referendum.

Whenever one contacts me, it's usually by text spamming my private phone number that I didn't give them that's also on the do-not-call list, asking me to vote for them.

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

#239

Post by Semaphor »

weberer wrote: post #203
Semaphor wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent, but I don’t have most of those. > Sponsored segments on YouTube I only watch music videos and very rarely a how to repair video. > Billboards I guess I sometimes see those in US TV shows ;) > newspapers I think I remember those things ;) > is hiring I guess, never saw those as ads. Though now that I think about it, I have started to want to figure out what BuildZoom does with custom homes, why YC funded t…

>>Billboards >I guess I sometimes see those in US TV shows ;) Lucky. In Helsinki they're in every metro station, every bus stop, and sometimes just in random spots along busy streets. Oh, and every metro car has screens playing video ads.

It probably helps that I don’t travel much…

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

#240

Post by cronix »

weberer wrote: post #203
Semaphor wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent, but I don’t have most of those. > Sponsored segments on YouTube I only watch music videos and very rarely a how to repair video. > Billboards I guess I sometimes see those in US TV shows ;) > newspapers I think I remember those things ;) > is hiring I guess, never saw those as ads. Though now that I think about it, I have started to want to figure out what BuildZoom does with custom homes, why YC funded t…

>>Billboards >I guess I sometimes see those in US TV shows ;) Lucky. In Helsinki they're in every metro station, every bus stop, and sometimes just in random spots along busy streets. Oh, and every metro car has screens playing video ads.

In the states, we now have them built into gas station pumps. So any time you get gas you have video ads blasting at you with some crappy loudspeaker.
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