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The Amazon tax

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Re: The Amazon tax

#371

Post by foamswimsuit »

ryandvm wrote: post #226
amluto wrote: post #208

> 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…

Burnt myself on this in Google Maps just this week. I had an appointment in my calendar with the location set to "Dr Firstname Lastname, 123 Main St, 12345". I clicked through it into Google Maps and since it had the full address specified I just trusted it. Well, it turned out that the first result was actually an ad for a competing doctor 20 minutes in the wrong direction. To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don…

Same! I searched a local pizza place to pick up a pizza I had ordered and took the first result. I searched for the exact name, I saw a picture of pizza, and I hit directions. Halfway there it didn't feel right and I checked. It was Dominoes. I was furious and my pizza sat for an extra 7 minutes.

Re: The Amazon tax

#372

Post by [deleted] »

GuB-42 wrote: post #171

It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work. Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality. As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenie…

[deleted]

Re: The Amazon tax

#373

Post by wat10000 »

xp84 wrote: post #302
evereverever wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please scan this item with our app to see YOUR price" -ftfy

Somehow this doesn't scare me at all. Fast food restaurants have been doing this for like 8 years. Almost any order you could make normally, you could get a buck or two off of it if you order through their incredibly sluggish, bloated cross-platform-framework "app" and redeem a "deal." And they tell you this with giant ads. The function is to get incremental sales (and hopefully establish a pattern of repeat business…

I don't really care about fast food. That's strictly an optional luxury. If the experience sucks too badly, skip it. Grocery would be another matter.

I also think this hypothetical "scan to see your price" scenario is a lot worse. As things stand now, there's still a baseline price. If the shelf says $8.99 then you know that you may be able to get a better price through their loyalty program or with a coupon, but it will never be more than $8.99. In a fully dynamic pricing world where you have to scan scan to get a number at all, which is what a lot of businesses would really love to have, you'd lose that baseline. That item might ring up at $20 if the system decides I'm desperate or inattentive or just don't care. This is already possible online, of course. If it spreads to grocery stores, though, I'm going to start channelling Ned Ludd and it won't be pretty.

Re: The Amazon tax

#374

Post by Tepix »

Amazon has many decisive conflicts of interest:

- improving search results vs less ad revenue

- promoting their own products vs merchants'

- streamlining the shopping vs trying to sell more stuff

As long as these fundamental conflicts aren't resolved, it's not going to improve.

Re: The Amazon tax

#375

Post by adamsmark »

Sort by "Best Sellers" always on Amazon. "Featured" is driven by ads. Also? Firefox with Ublock Origin blocks ads (but it's an endless cat and mouse game).

Re: The Amazon tax

#376

Post by Tepix »

GuB-42 wrote: post #171

It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work. Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality. As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenie…

> It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.

It doesn't have to be that way. Can you keep your search results pure and put ads next to them. If the ads are good, customers will be interested.

Yes, you will have fewer clicks (i.e. less ad revenue) than if you try to deceive your customers by not clearly marking ads. But you don't have to enshittify your page. Enshittification also lowers the value of your business, particularly in the long term.

Re: The Amazon tax

#377

Post by SoftTalker »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #357
SoftTalker wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's the other way around, the shelf prices can be stable and they decide which discounts you can get based on your shopping profile which they built using surveillance

Well,,, OK?

If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.

Though mostly, the discounts I use are already posted on the shelf, I just need to "clip" an e-coupon in the app to get it.

They do send me emails and even postal mails with coupons too, but those all go in the trash.

Re: The Amazon tax

#378

Post by gretch »

qurren wrote: post #227
delegate wrote: post #224

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…

Related: I've seen several local restaurants offering extremely good food come up and die simply because they could never get attention. People only look at recommendations now, they don't look with their eyes anymore. So now restaurants have to focus on growth hacking rather than food quality.

This really isn't a new problem.

That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".

Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.

I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.

source: my parents were in the restaurant business

Re: The Amazon tax

#379

Post by Defletter »

zahlman wrote: post #367
Defletter wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware of that, no. I can say that it wasn't a feature of our history lessons in school, nor in various Holocaust documentaries I have watched, nor something that came up in conversation with friends and colleagues, nor have I personally seen it when it's been posted to HackerNews (if this is anything to go by: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=IBM%20holocaust&sort=byDate&ty... ). I only learned about Oracle's co…

> But you are proving my point: what do I do now with this information? I would use it to question the premise > we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide which in reality I decided was obviously wrong the first time I heard it, many years ago. In fact, I don't think this concept of "complicity" is morally valid at all.

Continuing the red/blue pill metaphor from earlier, what you're describing is not dissimilar to Cypher's betrayal to be plugged back in.

Re: The Amazon tax

#380

Post by andrewla »

jonahx wrote: post #288
andrewla wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's confusing to me that amazon is in the ads business at all though. They're a retail service, not an ad business and it seems that all the ad business does is burn goodwill. They do have goodwill to burn, but it cheapens the entire experience.

Per the article, in exchange for that goodwill they get a billion dollars per week. Do we need more explanation? To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.

I don't expect to get any sort of explanation from Amazon of course. I do think they are probably doing something that is hurting them financially. Acquired goodwill is extremely hard to measure and shows up in things like long-term customer retention and engagement, so you're not going to see it on an A/B test -- on a A/B test users come in with the same level of goodwill on both sides of the fork and thus their immediate behavior is not going to be dictated by this.

In many ways this is symptomatic of larger trends in society and managerial culture of looking for ways to measure things rather than confronting the messy subjective non-measurable reality.

The only time we'll get a true counterfactual is when a competitor arises who can meet Amazon's very high bar for logistic excellence but can offer a more appealing interaction, and then Amazon retail will die off without anyone understanding how or why it happened.

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