351–360 of 731 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just pur…
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.
Results do seem better.. What in this instance, does "Best Sellers" mean?
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just pur…
> the platform will choose what you'll buy Assuming they were any good at it. They can’t even figure out basic product design. You cannot have the purchase funnels you describe without better UI/UX. Amazon’s is abysmal. Very often people leave Amazon and boycott them entirely (like I do) because the experience is so awful across the board. I don’t believe they are “guiding” anyone to anything. Amazon only became prof…
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just pur…
It's been noticed, just not put into words very often. And it's not as if anyone felt like they could do anything about it.
This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just pur…
Years ago Amazon intentionally nerfed their own on-site search into complete uselessness. A step at a time they removed the ability to exclude a term by prefixing a '-', then they removed grouping terms into a phrase either with quote marks or plus+signs. For years these all worked well. It's no longer plausible that the reason is to serve semantic search results, they could still include synonyms lower in results while respecting exclusion and phrases but that would make what's really going on too obvious.
The real reason they nerfed their search so bad I often have to use Google with "site:amazon.com" is simply so they can serve up whatever results are most profitable which vaguely semantically match any term. This is a big profit center due to all the 'marketing programs' they push on third-party sellers. Paying for these is virtually required to get on the first page of any popular search. Amazon has a huge inventory of such listings and selling you one of those listing is more profitable for Amazon, but assuming the price is the same, less profitable for the reseller due to giving Amazon even more of their slim margin. Since playing this game has become required, it raises the ASP of all products - another Amazon tax.
Through the Bezos era and up until around ten years ago, Amazon was "good", meaning their broad strategies and policies were generally a net gain for most buyers. Things Like allowing negative reviews and no-questions returns made me a fan and allowed Amazon to destroy all its competition. Since then they've gradually A/B tested their way into, IMHO, pure evil.
For consumers, the only real net gains Amazon still provides is massive inventory and faster delivery for Prime items (although you may have noticed they are now also strategically degrading Prime delivery consistency). Everything else about Amazon is objectively worse. Products are more expensive, search is intentionally broken, the site is rife with paid placements and dark patterns. And no one can compete because as soon as a new upstart offers search that works or lower prices by not forcing all sellers into high-margin programs, Amazon will un-nerf that specific enshittification just enough until the new threat is exterminated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Please scan this item with our app to see the price"
As of now, my local supermarkets still have price tags on the shelves. And if there's a higher price at the register when the item is scanned, they will honor the shelf price if you call it to their attention. The biggest supermarket now has e-ink shelf tags so I assume those are synced with their item database so that doesn't happen anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has that actually happened in retail stores? All I can find on the topic is about online purchases (or ordering/paying online and picking it up at the store). To do this in brick-and-mortar, you'd have to use remotely programmable price tags and detect who is looking at what, which seems doable, but then you still run into all kinds of tough questions with no good answers. If I happen to see the price tag change from…
"Please scan this item with our app to see the price"
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…
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price. "Only" here is incorrect. I posit every public company's primary concern is stock price. But certain behaviors and values align with driving that stock price up and for Amazon it's Customer Obsession. And they are not obsessed with it because they love you, it's because they love your repeat business. But that obsession means your happiness a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really baffles me when an American can just walk into a store and buy car parts for their fairly niche model from the 1990s. Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had t…
Weird, I rather have more government mandated vacation, public healthcare, and a pension system that doesn't mean I have to work in my 60s but I understand people have different priorities in life. Hopefully you move beyond the consumerist phase as it's probably the lowest rung of the human experience.