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The Amazon tax

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Re: The Amazon tax

#401

Post by alejohausner »

Freedom2 wrote: post #359
libria wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not very customer obsessed when their email that they send me doesn't even have which items I've ordered.

That's because you probably are using gmail, and Google is reading your emails and harvesting your shopping history. That's why Amazon is being secretive: to deny Google that information.

Re: The Amazon tax

#402

Post by dpkirchner »

libria wrote: post #151
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…

> 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…

The fact is that Amazon has at least two customers here: you, the user trying to find an item to buy, and advertisers, likely trying to convince you to buy a lower quality product. Who wins? I'm guessing the advertiser. They are far more likely to have a sales contact, anyway.

Re: The Amazon tax

#403

Post by marginalx »

GuB-42 wrote: post #308
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.

How is it confusing? Most brick and mortar stores show ads for specific products. Online platforms other than Amazon do it too. The only thing is that Amazon is more diversified than other retailers, in particular, they have AWS, essentially selling the platform that runs their website to third parties. It makes sense for them to offer sell their ad service to third parties too.

No one does it like Amazon, it requires users to walk through the sponsored ads before they can see organic search results, almost no other platform does this online. Walmart has a single strip of sponsored results at top, immediately leading to organic results, others like Target, HomeDepot do not mix in sponsored results with search results.

B&M is different, Ads are there, but you aren't forced to look at them like Amazon does.

Re: The Amazon tax

#404

Post by dpkirchner »

alejohausner wrote: post #401
Freedom2 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very customer obsessed when their email that they send me doesn't even have which items I've ordered.

That's because you probably are using gmail, and Google is reading your emails and harvesting your shopping history. That's why Amazon is being secretive: to deny Google that information.

I'm ok with Google having that information. Where is the checkbox to enable including useful details in emails?

Re: The Amazon tax

#405

Post by aeturnum »

its_ethan wrote: post #391
aeturnum wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is true if you reverse it: there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives. This also lines up a lot better with other complaints with amazon: their inability to get rid of counterfeit sellers, the degree to which their reviews (and listings) are gamed, etc. Arguably the reason people buy garbage on Amazon has more to do with their lack of in…

> there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives OK, but the customer is the only person who gets to decide what that means. "Reversing the idea" is just making the same (imo faulty) assumption that the author is, which is that there is some known "good value" product that everyone should be buying. What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying f…

I don't think that's true. I think deficient or faulty products exist and amazon often sells them. It is not at all assuming that everyone should buy one product - simply that there are psudo-scam products that would be risky for anyone to buy.

Like, are you suggesting that when someone tries to buy a brand-name product and receives a counterfeit knockoff instead, that some proportion of those customers prefer to pay brand-name prices for knock offs? That doesn't seem very likely to me.

Re: The Amazon tax

#406

Post by marginalx »

This is by far the most annoying thing about Amazon to me. They clearly are doing a disservice to their consumer with this. Many times I go straight to google to search for Amazon products, which leads to better results

Re: The Amazon tax

#407

Post by RobotToaster »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #241
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…

Searched for jeans a few days ago. I got about 3.3% each, scattered through several dozen pages, of two American brands; 1.65% each another couple of brands; a smattering of one or two results for another couple of brands; the remaining approximately 90% were the almost exact same jeans (maybe the same), under several names... pages and pages of them. It is almost impossible to shop for clothes on Amazon now. It used…

Most of the stuff Amazon search spits out by default now is identical to what you find on temu, just at 5 times the price.

You can make it slightly more useful by changing the sort order to average rating or best selling, but for many "normie" things the bestselling will just be the crap amazon shows people by default.

Re: The Amazon tax

#408

Post by everybodyknows »

zetanor wrote: post #170

The 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…

> What does it mean that I'm the importer?

Hello! Another thing it means is that you are legally responsible for paying ... ta-dum ... TARIFFS!

Re: The Amazon tax

#409

Post by glitchcrab »

criddell wrote: post #65
bariumbitmap wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the GP but I bought a wooden lapdesk on Etsy that I use every day.

The person you responded to has a good point though. It does take some diligence on Etsy to avoid people reselling or drop shipping mass produced items.

Some of the prices are crazy too. I wanted 4 tenting legs for my keyboard, found some on Etsy for £100 total (no joke). 4 of the exact same item from AliExpress cost me about £4 including shipping.

Re: The Amazon tax

#410

Post by delfugal »

Amazon is nearly worthless to find anything anymore. Same items repeated dozens to hundreds of times, with minor changes, but all pointing to the same item.

It's like GOogle when ads outweighed your search results. Amazon has become a garbage pit.

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