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The Amazon tax

seths.blog

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Re: The Amazon tax

#141

Post by liendolucas »

Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases.

It's gone and confirmed and acknowledged by their support which made me take a screenshot of the popup where the card details are entered to confirm it. They in turned wanted to give me a 15€ gift card for the inconvenience and told them that I wasn't there asking for a gift card or discount and refused it.

So every single time you purchase with your credit card if you do not want your details to be saved, you have to MANUALLY go to your personal settings and remove the added card from your last purchase. Fucking amazing.

On top of that listings are overflowed with chinese brands and/or items that have no correlation to what I'm looking for.

Can someone suggest better alternatives here in Europe?

Re: The Amazon tax

#142

Post by ooterness »

bko wrote: post #71

> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. "The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. Bu…

Amazon has turned the search ranking into a contest for who can give Jeff Bezos the most money. How is that an improvement on anything?

Re: The Amazon tax

#143

Post by vel0city »

paytonjjones wrote: post #59
pydry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, but I'd say it's slightly more likely than by chance (after all, success begets capital). I actually prefer Dr. Pepper, but a lot of people think Coke makes the best cola, Apple makes the best laptops, etc.

Should Dr Pepper have to spend a dollar per purchase to be the top result when you search for "Dr Pepper"? Is it good for the customer that when they search Dr Pepper and they stopped paying for the placement ads the first page is no longer Dr Pepper but instead "UUBUOI SODA 100% SODA COLA POP PEPPER 7 UP〖1L〗〖2L〗〖12OZ〗〖500ML〗" AND "FUUOYAY YUM YUM SPARKLE FIZZ 致癌神水"

While this isn't necessarily the reality for sodas, this is the reality for darn near every thing I look to buy off Amazon.

Re: The Amazon tax

#144

Post by geodel »

"Your margins are my opportunity"

The great Bezos said ones and people, companies, stock market loved it. Now new CEO is noticing Amazon customers also have some margin and hence more opportunity for Amazon.

Re: The Amazon tax

#145

Post by threetonesun »

bko wrote: post #71

> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. "The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. Bu…

"The best" for many products is often static, on the level of decades. Better e-commerce websites than Amazon will curate away all the garbage and only show you the best things. At this point you can pretty much use the top 5 results from any Amazon search to rule out things NOT to buy.

Re: The Amazon tax

#146

Post by awakeasleep »

83457 wrote: post #30

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.

of course, the best seller is usually whoever has spent the most on advertising

Re: The Amazon tax

#147

Post by johnnyApplePRNG »

MengerSponge wrote: post #63
johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #42

Amazon has no mercy, so neither do I. In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...) So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to br…

Most likely they're sticking it to a delivery contractor. Amazon gets paid, you get your free stuff, and some working class stiff is peeing in a bottle driving a leased truck and not getting paid for their labor. Win win win, right?

You seriously believe the guy peeing in the bottle during deliveries is the one who eats the charge?

This isn't a restaurant and they're not waiters.

Re: The Amazon tax

#148

Post by [deleted] »

whall6 wrote: post #117

Is this not the direct result of consumers being too lazy to price match and price discover? Amazon still has the ability to sort price: low to high. You also still have the ability to ask your friends and family what air fryer they purchased. If the average consumer just implicitly trusts Amazon such that they buy whatever shows up first, that’s not Amazon’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault. I am worried that we h…

[deleted]

Re: The Amazon tax

#149

Post by JKCalhoun »

cute_boi wrote: post #116
abixb wrote: post #29

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 o…

I would love to support mom and pop stores if they don't charge 25% more than amazon. Here, in NY buying from small store means getting ripped off.

Yeah, those moms and pops are ripping us off, living like… well, not like Bezos.

Re: The Amazon tax

#150

Post by rjrjrjrj »

teiferer wrote: post #114

> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over. As much as I'd like to agree with the article's point and am critical of Amazon etc etc, you lost me here. $35k cash bonus for every employee does not pass the smell test. I'm sure the delivery driver who famously needs to pee into a bottle because they can't afford a toilet bre…

The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions. They're employees of contract companies that put the Amazon logo on their vans.

But that aside, what part do you disagree so strongly with?

52 weeks * $1B weekly advertising profit / 1.5M employees = ~$35000

I don't know how he's determining profit, but quarterly advertising revenue is ~$20B and margins are presumably very high.

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