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The Amazon tax

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Re: The Amazon tax

#181

Post by falcor84 »

imoldfella wrote: post #157

Don't hate the player, hate the game. This is no different than grocery stores selling shelf space. It is not at all like theft (morally wrong) or taxes (infamously inefficient). And if you don't do it, you go out of business since you aren't competitive with someone that does. It's sad that such obvious rage bait makes it to the top of hacker news.

What do you mean? I don't see how Amazon would go out of business if they show the best match for the thing you just searched for higher than the ads.

Re: The Amazon tax

#182

Post by SomeHacker44 »

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 have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.

Best Buy, Microcenter, B&H, Walmart all do better. They just don't have the range or sometimes do not respect my tax forms.

I am an hour drive from a larger town with a big box store like Walmart. The Best Buy closed. The closest thing nearby is something called Tractor Supply. They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys. They are super cute.

Re: The Amazon tax

#183

Post by mirmor23 »

lots of people here defending amazon blindly seem to be unaware of the full picture of how amazon ads works in the context of the marketplace.

the point is that, if airfryer B is rival of A, and B buys ads (to let amazon show B ahead of A even if they searched for A), and A doesn't buy ads, then if B resorts to marketing to lower the quality just enough to compete, then all the quality focus of A will not end up increasing their sales.

more importantly, to have a good view on which products are good which one are the best is not available inside of amazon that easily. reusing sku, tricking people into buying inferior ones does not impact amazon in any way since return costs are paid by the fba vendor, or seller.

Re: The Amazon tax

#184

Post by brunoborges »

"If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. 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 (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."

This is it.

Re: The Amazon tax

#185

Post by graemep »

frereubu wrote: post #95

I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really mi…

A cheaper alternative is Argos for a lot of things.

Re: The Amazon tax

#186

Post by ben_w »

retired wrote: post #129
scrollop wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your next 10 purchases that you don't need within 3 days, use an llm to find the best choice for your needs (have been doing this and learning a lot on how the ideas I had about a product prior to purchasing missed many things I didn't knew I dind't know, and the llm helped to find better products) and ask the LLM to find alternative shops - you may be surprised and have the nice feeling of increasing choice in t…

Why use an LLM for something that is a 5 second Google? Google Products is right there in the top. Forums will advice you on alternative products. Am I getting old? I feel like a dinosaur still Googling things.

Google's search results defaulting to starting with an LLM; and by the power of SEO, so are many of the search results themselves.

Having to add "reddit" to get genuine results was already a meme 3 years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY&pp=ygUXZ29vZ2xlI...

Re: The Amazon tax

#187

Post by [deleted] »

snarf21 wrote: post #40
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…

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?

[deleted]

Re: The Amazon tax

#188

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

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.

The word monopoly has lost all meaning online, it seems to just be synonymous now with 'successful business'.

You can cut Amazon out of your life tomorrow if you wanted. You could do it almost entirely with just Walmart.com if you wanted a dropin replacement.

If you only have one internet provider in your area, that's a monopoly, the cost of switching is essentially 'start an ISP'. Having to type in walmart.com does not make Amazon a monopoly.

Re: The Amazon tax

#189

Post by apparent »

Imagine there's a best-selling toaster. Amazon can recommend it and many people will be happy buying it. Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm? To send a strong enough signal, it would probably need a level of sales that could only be achieved with some level of advertising.

Separately, I'd note that Amazon doesn't want high levels of returns (which it has to pay for in many cases), so they still try to herd people toward products that they will find acceptable. Might they not love them as much as some others? Perhaps, though this is a fine line to try to walk, and I'm not sure that Amazon is actually trying to walk it.

Re: The Amazon tax

#190

Post by joshstrange »

Amazon search has been terrible for as long as I can remember. Not to disregard the scourge of ads that has infested the results but I've been frustrated with Amazon search for almost 2 decades.

Oh sure, their search gives you the impression you can filter/sort but due to zero policing anyone can say whatever they want about their product and I have the feeling Amazon just sucks at this on top of the seller malice.

Just try to filter down to the dimensions you need, the connector you are looking for, the material you'd prefer and you'll be inundated with tons of items that share not resemblance to the filters you entered.

I only want X brand, here I hope you want to see results from Z, W, Q brands as well!

I only want items under 2ft wide, here are 4ft, 1ft, 6ft options!

I want only It's all a miserable experience. Often I skip the filters because if they are so bad at keeping out the trash then I worry I'll also lose legit options because I have zero trust in Amazon's ability to accurately filter.

I won't pretend running Amazon is easy but I'm constantly in shock at how absolutely terrible Amazon's website is to use. The number of UIs that are clearly optimized around data retrieval optimization instead of serving the customer is insane.

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