The article mentions that the "best" airfyer seller also has to place bids on their names / keywords, but I don't think there's a best, just like there's no best shoes. There are so many niches that exist in products — does it fit in a tight space, what's the shape, what's the air-frying technique, do the buttons work with oven mitts — so there are different bestsellers in each subcategory.
The Amazon tax
191–200 of 731 posts
Re: The Amazon tax
#192Amazon 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.
I imagine most readers haven't tried tiktok shop (or similar Chinese consumer shopping platforms). ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective. Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chin…
> Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them
No reason to get congress involved when you can have the president suspend duty-free de minimus with executive authority.
Re: The Amazon tax
#193I'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…
In my experience, Etsy and Amazon are both following the same trajectory. Lower quality, lower value, fake and imitation products becoming more common, etc. On Etsy, it used to be the norm that a product would be unique, interesting, and probably handmade. Now, there’s a decent amount of 3D/screen printed junk that might also have some AI slop thrown in for good measure. The corporations have also moved in, just like they did with Airbnb.
The most common issue for me is what happened when I bought a custom dog bowl, thinking the ceramic was made by the seller. Later stumbled upon something similar and realized it was just an off the shelf bowl and the dog’s name had been painted on. That not worth nothing, and it was still probably nicer than what I could’ve gotten on Amazon, and maybe I should’ve asked before buying. But there’s just a lot of that, “make a quick buck” type of stuff and it’s not always obvious.
Re: The Amazon tax
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
At this point in time… …you've got to figure that Google is just as disgusting as Amazon in the ads/search dept. LLMs seem positively naive in that regard. Just, you know, simply suggesting what their subsumption of the internet suggests. (For now anyway.)
Doesn’t ChatGPT also recommend products from their advertisers first?
Re: The Amazon tax
#195When 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.
And you can buy a position on the best seller list for your product.
Re: The Amazon tax
#196Amazon 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.
It’s wild. I was trying to find a cheap bookshelf with a specific style the other day. Firstly, I couldn’t filter by exact width. It autogenerated a width range (like 24-30”) which was different on subsequent searches and several inches away from what I wanted. Second, I found a product I liked but was the wrong size. As far as I could tell, they can’t even show you recommended similar products. They show you what ot…
I looked at well over 1000 listings when looking for a new desk. The filters are sick joke. This was pre-llm, today I'd write something to scrape the results and parse the product pages/images to filter out the crap.
Re: The Amazon tax
#197Don'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.
Huh, retail store has fixed amount of shelf space, it can't keep infinite variants, but Amazon has infinite real estate it can keep the exact item you search for on page 23 instead of page 1. Have same item appear 10 times on different pages/places in search, retail store can't do that.
It is like saying newspaper classified ads are same as Google ads. Not very good comparison.
Re: The Amazon tax
#198Amazon is a net-negative overall but I don't think this understanding is correct:
> 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 only true in extremely simply scenarios. In reality, most of the time individual consumers may prefer something other than "the highest ranked item in this category." Maybe another company has a feature that increases cost but adds utility, maybe there's a brand you trust more that makes a slightly less popular version, etc.
The problems of parasitic advertising still exist. People still see ads for products they will like less than the top rated search, but it's wrong to imagine that Amazon actually knows what that person would like best. If matching people to products was that easy you'd have all kinds of 3rd party recommendation services making very specific recommendations to make money off affiliate links. Instead we have a million "top 10" sites that work about as well as picking the #1 seller in an amazon category: not that well.
Re: The Amazon tax
#199One could argue that Google Ads are jacking up the prices of hotels.
To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.
Re: The Amazon tax
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon is just so convenient for me. They deliver within a day in a package locker next to home. Meanwhile with other platforms it takes up to a week, the delivery timeframe is 08:00 to 21:00, I then have to wait for the delivery person to call me because they can never find my front door. And if I happen to be on the toilet when they ring the package is delivered to a parcel point ten kilometers away. So I have to r…
You live in Europe, where everything is harder, and when it comes to shopping, you have maybe one-fifth of the choices Americans have. I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.