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The Amazon tax

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Re: The Amazon tax

#21

Post by pydry »

paytonjjones wrote: post #10

> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying. People's urge to rid the world of ads…

you sound like the kind of person who believes the best air fryer is the one that is advertised the most.

Re: The Amazon tax

#22

Post by detourdog »

bluGill wrote: post #9
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #2

This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example. What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies. One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the ca…

> What can we do about it? Not much. You should do what I do: look for someplace else to buy from first. Amazon has "everything" - if you can find it. However there are usually small sellers of that niche (often niche.com) where they know something about the product and will direct your to the best one without adds. The smaller/weirder the niche the more likely this seller is to be helpful. You get to support "the li…

Usually I can purchase directly from the company that makes the product website.

Re: The Amazon tax

#23

Post by runarberg »

tchalla wrote: post #4

Principal agent problem combined with a monopoly, what could go wrong? In the end, we as a society value convenience more than global optima. So we will always land in some local optima. We deserve it.

I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else.

In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.

Re: The Amazon tax

#24

Post by forestrywat »

paytonjjones wrote: post #10

> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying. People's urge to rid the world of ads…

I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."

You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.

If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.

Re: The Amazon tax

#25

Post by hatsix »

paytonjjones wrote: post #10

> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying. People's urge to rid the world of ads…

right, you've spent most of your capital on product, and now you're competing with everyone else on $/ad.

Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.

Re: The Amazon tax

#26

Post by genghisjahn »

Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.

Re: The Amazon tax

#27

Post by geerlingguy »

It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.

I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).

Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.

Re: The Amazon tax

#28

Post by paytonjjones »

Georgelemental wrote: post #13
paytonjjones wrote: post #10

> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying. People's urge to rid the world of ads…

The problem TFA is complaining about isn't ads in general, but specifically ads in Amazon search results for products sold on Amazon.

Amazon is a two-sided marketplace. Why should their obligation in search be 100% to one side?

Even for the buyer, there are second order consequences if you remove the ability for sellers to effectively sell. If sellers can't effectively ramp, they're going to turn to other platforms. If new sellers can't compete on Amazon, prices will increase and diversity of options will go down.

I'm not saying ads in search are a hard necessity in every platform. I'm just asking people to think through the whole issue before making snap judgments because ads are annoying to them.

Re: The Amazon tax

#29

Post by abixb »

I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.

I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.

I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.

Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.

Re: The Amazon tax

#30

Post by 83457 »

When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
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