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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

#241

Post by jackson1442 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #120

I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page. Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website? I think ads play the biggest part in why the Inter…

> What's next, ads on banking apps

Whenever I have a transaction with my brokerage, Chase adds a note telling me how much better Chase's investment arm is than them in my transaction feed.

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

#242

Post by fuzzylightbulb »

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?

When you ask the shopkeeper where the Pepsi is, and he insists on showing you a Coke knockoff while actively hiding the Pepsi from sight, that is when you stop patronizing the store. This is what people in this thread are fired up about.

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

#243

Post by wyre »

bombcar wrote: post #172
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size. This exact thing happened to me. One of the problems, was that the bulb I was looking at, had a specific mini-candelabra socket, and the ones they showed me, had one that was just slightly larger, but looked almost identical (and the name was also “mini candelabra”). This was one of those “recommendations,” in the list at the bottom.…

Amazon is rapidly dropping to my second or third place to look, I often start at Home Depot or Best Buy or other places without a marketplace first, then only sanity check Amazon to make sure I can't save somehow. Same thing happened to eBay, any attempt to cut down on the scammers just reduced the number of actual real sellers, until basically there's nothing but scammers left for large swaths of the site.

I’m constantly purchasing things from sellers on eBay and have no run-ins with scammers.

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

#244

Post by juujian »

rippercushions wrote: post #116
juujian wrote: post #111

What's interesting is that in this model a lot of companies might be paying for ads without ever seeing a return, because they cannot outbid those at the top. In that case, Amazon would be sponging up money from a lot of players and returning it to a few. Which would be ok, but the problem is that you can either play the game or drop out. So it becomes a little bit of a gig economy thing where in theory you're free b…

That's not how online ads work? You bid for ad space, but you pay only if you get clicks, and are booted out fast if you don't get any. If you're always outbid, or nobody clicks on your ads, your spend is zero.

You would be right about that. "Sellers only pay the ad fee when a potential customer clicks on their Amazon listing. If no one clicks then there's no cost. As your ad is representative of your product and your Amazon listing is professional, you should be able to get a sale out of a significant number of your clicks" (Sep 21, 2021). If it's still like that, yeah that's different.

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

#245

Post by jimt1234 »

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.

Unfortunately, I can confirm this. When I purchase something like a t-shirt outside of Amazon, it feels weird to pay $8 for shipping, but it feels like forever waiting 10 days to actually receive it. It's not the end of the world, but yeah, Amazon has conditioned me.

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

#246

Post by bombcar »

wyre wrote: post #243
bombcar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is rapidly dropping to my second or third place to look, I often start at Home Depot or Best Buy or other places without a marketplace first, then only sanity check Amazon to make sure I can't save somehow. Same thing happened to eBay, any attempt to cut down on the scammers just reduced the number of actual real sellers, until basically there's nothing but scammers left for large swaths of the site.

I’m constantly purchasing things from sellers on eBay and have no run-ins with scammers.

eBay is still quite usable if you know what you're doing, and "scammers" here isn't referring to actual "ship you a brick instead of a laptop" but "water down search results with acres and acres of cheap Alibaba shit"

Which is sometimes exactly what people want.

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

#247

Post by throw10920 »

Drblessing wrote: post #211
mabbo wrote: post #205

I keep trying to explain to people: they aren't "ads" they are "pay for customers to ever see your product". It's an extortion ring, basically. Just like nobody ever opens page 2 of Google search, people rarely scroll down very far on Amazon's product search page. These "ads" just put the highest bidders' products at the top-K spots (and K keeps increasing) so that customers aren't see the most relevant products, jus…

You don't like it? Don't shop at Amazon!

Voting with your wallet and criticizing immoral decisions made by a company (or person) are not mutually exclusive.

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

#248

Post by freejazz »

Zetice wrote: post #235
freejazz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh wow, you conveniently know the exact people doing those exact things at Walmart but instead first made up that I expressed a negative sentiment. Yeah, okay.

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

#249

Post by JohnFen »

bradleyjg wrote: post #217
mabbo wrote: post #205

I keep trying to explain to people: they aren't "ads" they are "pay for customers to ever see your product". It's an extortion ring, basically. Just like nobody ever opens page 2 of Google search, people rarely scroll down very far on Amazon's product search page. These "ads" just put the highest bidders' products at the top-K spots (and K keeps increasing) so that customers aren't see the most relevant products, jus…

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.

Yes. I've reduced my Amazon usage to zero, with no ill effects whatsoever.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

stronglikedan wrote: post #226
Drblessing wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't like it? Don't shop at Amazon!

Why not? That sounds like cutting off your nose to spite your face! They usually have the best prices and fastest delivery. I'll just ignore the bits I don't like, and still shop there.

[deleted]
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