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The Amazon tax
271–280 of 731 posts
Re: The Amazon tax
#272> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“ I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this: 1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an…
It reminds me of an analogy I read a while ago in an article critiquing keyword based online advertising (can't find the article unfortunately). A restaurant wants to drum up new business, so the owner tasks three employees with handing out flyers with coupons attached. The coupons are marked to identify which employee passed them out, and each week the owner gives a bonus to the employee whose coupons get redeemed t…
This is what I wonder… the author says that:
> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“
But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.
It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.
Re: The Amazon tax
#273I can't comment on the economics of it but amazon search is awful, and I think it's by design, not just by design though.
I was recently searching for some draw runners of a certain fixed size. Just cheap ones for some drawers I'm making for a workbench.
Found some cheap ones but not the correct length, but it made me realise something; If I sorted by price low to high the cheap ones did not show on any of the results pages. Amazon was purposefully showing me more expensive products.
I took some info from the cheap ones, searched for that, and the ones I wanted showed up in the search.
I wonder if anyone has trawled all of Amazon, and made a better search tool that doesn't try to rip anyone off?
Anyway, I am starting to find products cheaper outside of Amazon, including p&p.
Re: The Amazon tax
#274Amazon 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.
Yeah, it's truly awful if you're looking for something specific. I tend to find things by finding something I don't want then clicking through 16 pages of "related to this item" ad nauseum. I find myself more often using ChatGPT to find things now because their search is sooo bad. Like, if I want petite clothes, I do not want clothes that are not petite, folks. Why is this hard?
I’m surprised that anyone would love Amazon so much that they resort to using third-party search so they can continue buying from Amazon. Rather than just shopping elsewhere!
There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.
Re: The Amazon tax
#275[flagged]
Re: The Amazon tax
#276It looks less like an advertising but more like a rent extraction with a casi toll on commerce that ultimately gets passed on to consumers
Re: The Amazon tax
#277I'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…
Yeah, same here. Shopping on Amazon is awful. Logistics and delivery, A-OK, but I don't want what they are selling.
I'm happy to wait 3 more days, and have inaccurate delivery estimates, in order to get what I actually want.
It also spurred me to move most of stuff off of AWS, which is saving me money now too! The cloud ecosystem has grown in the past 10 years, and I hadn't shopped around, and was missing out on better experience that cost far less.
Re: The Amazon tax
#278> 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.
There is basically no category of anything where there is something that is THE best, once you take buyer preferences and tradeoffs like cost, quality, time, brand, etc. into account.
Re: The Amazon tax
#279The new (to me) Amazon Haul storefront is (to me) hilarious. I was stunned when I first saw it: https://www.amazon.com/haul/store I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Sh…
Wow. Amazon Haul looks like the latest way to speed run heavy metal poisoning.
Re: The Amazon tax
#280Is this different than the decades-only practice of grocery stores auctioning off all the eye-level shelf space to brands willing to pay for it?