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Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

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Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#511

Post by fuzztester »

smt88 wrote: post #456
fuzztester wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

What's wrong with it is that it was a stupid idea. People don't shop with their voices and never have. They need to see things.

>People don't shop with their voices and never have.

>They need to see things.

Nyet. Non. Nada.

What world do you live in?

People seeing things and then shopping with their voices are not mutually exclusive actions.

Not only are they complementary, they are very common, and must have been from the dawn of shops.

How many billions of times, worldwide, must people have looked around at some products there, and said "give me 5 foos and 10 bars" at their neighbourhood store or other shop?

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#512

Post by cozzyd »

tgma wrote: post #361
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fun. The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility. I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place. In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague i…

Can you think of any downside of that proposal at all? Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.

Tax rates are easily discoverable (more so than currently hidden things like tariffs).

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#513

Post by eru »

mschuster91 wrote: post #238
booi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and tha…

> Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it.

That's pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's about blind ordering without worrying about the price.

No one complained that Amazon was hiding prices or making price per quantity hard to discover.

Even with the legislation you suggest, wild price swings are still entirely legal.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#514

Post by amanaplanacanal »

tgma wrote: post #491
chowells wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant. Give me the total price, so I know how much something will cost. I don't care what percentage of it goes where. I only care about easily evaluating whether something is worth the price. Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit…

> The amount of tax is equally useless to me. Not if you are voting someone in a political office in the next election.

Then you can look up how much the tax is when you are making your voting decision. This isn’t secret information.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#515

Post by visarga »

asdasdsddd wrote: post #350
alexathrowawa9 wrote: post #114

Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire bui…

I've interviewed many people on Alexa before. From what I gather, its just a giant switch statement, and each individual "path" takes a bunch of effort to support and there are thousands of paths for music, ordering, commands, etc. It's peak AI == if statement architecture.

> I've interviewed many people on Alexa before.

I got a recruiting message once for a ML engineer position in Alexa, ignored it.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#516

Post by ertian »

swatcoder wrote: post #100
paxys wrote: post #86

The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…

On top of that, when you consider how often Alexa plays the wrong song, it's pretty hard to trust it with purchases. The equivalent of asking for a pop song and getting heavy metal would be trying to order some pens and ending up with a canoe or something.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#517

Post by mkl »

WalterBright wrote: post #377
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fun. The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility. I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place. In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague i…

The tax exclusive prices lets you know how much the government is soaking you, rather than hiding it and blaming it on the business.

No one would blame the business. Receipts should show sales tax clearly.

I would very much blame the business for leaving out tax, concealing how much I'll need to pay to try to get me to overspend. Businesses claiming they don't want to be blamed for sales tax existing seems like misdirection from the real reason: it makes it look like you're spending less.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#518

Post by girvo »

tgma wrote: post #361
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fun. The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility. I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place. In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague i…

Can you think of any downside of that proposal at all? Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.

...the receipts show what tax is charged in the total. This is a total non-issue. Tax-exclusive pricing is ridiculous.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#519

Post by fuzztester »

akira2501 wrote: post #505
fuzztester wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

> is there anything wrong with that? Yes. They are losing billions on the deal and consumers didn't have their expectations met. > is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits You're describing the main reason for owning one. This has nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.

>> is there anything wrong with that?

>Yes. They are losing billions on the deal

biz 101: losses in business commonly happen anytime. losses are not wrong or right. they just happen, for various reasons. it is called an occupational hazard. if getting profits all the time was guaranteed, every tom, dick and harry would be running a business.

so companies know about the possibility of losses before they start up.

>and consumers didn't have their expectations met.

naive. companies don't do businesses for that reason. that is kind of a side effect, although a desirable one for companies, because it makes customers continue as customers. companies do business to make money (i.e. profits, not even just sales), plain and simple.

whether we like that or not, and whether their behaviour is ethical or not, and legal or not, are separate, though related issues.

how many times has this been stated on hn, even if in other words? plenty, I bet.

apart from that, it is sheer common knowledge.

>>is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits

>You're describing the main reason for owning one.

Yes. Is that not obvious?

>This has nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.

you are jumping around, and skirting my question. you, i, or we, may or may not wish to allow them to exist, but what the heck does that have to do with my original question? :

>>>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales.

>>is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

I doubt that there is any company that envisions a product that will decrease sales, or even keep them flat. then why go to the trouble?

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#520

Post by dsclough »

crazygringo wrote: post #210
swatcoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…

This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…

The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine.

How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths

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