Maybe we need ad blockers for Amazon ads.
The Amazon tax
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Re: The Amazon tax
#32Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
This plus the login-walled reviews is unfortunate because once I stopped buying from Amazon I'd continue to go there to browse before buying elsewhere.
The amount of review spam is so high that for a good portion of products the reviews are useless.
Re: The Amazon tax
#33Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
Even without the ads, Amazon search is abysmal. It seems to ignore half the words you enter. I often resort to using Google or ChatGPT to find items on Amazon which I know are there, but which their search box doesn't surface.
Re: The Amazon tax
#34Has anyone found a useable fake review detector since Fakespot and Review Meta went down?
Re: The Amazon tax
#35See also: ads for apps in app stores. These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
Apple should really be ashamed of itself. But alas, corporations don't have shame, Steve would have been ashamed though.
Re: The Amazon tax
#36It'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…
Enshittification is such a perfect word for all this. Cory Doctorow is a word magician.
Re: The Amazon tax
#37Always best to search across Amazon, Ebay and Walmart. Vendors sell the same stuff across all three channels.
Re: The Amazon tax
#38I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead
Ads too, I guess
Re: The Amazon tax
#39Prime is a waste of money. I find most stuff arrives in 2-3 days and its easy to spend the minimum to get free shipping.
Re: The Amazon tax
#40I'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 o…
Generally curious but a lot of the stuff I find on Etsy is the same crap from Alibaba/Amazon .. What are you buying from Etsy that isn't this?