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Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

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Re: Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

#11

Post by Periodic »

Hoff wrote: post #7

Adams is describing how marketing (tries to) work. Marketing seeks to identify customers. In a manner of consideration, Adams is seeking to acquire better and more targeted search results, or skills in searching for products or services. Google Adwords tries to offers something close. But the Googlers are not very good at this level of targeting. (Yet?) As for specifically contacting buyers, that's expensive for comm…

The key problem is one of cost. As it is right now the customer pays the costs of specifically linking up with a supplier for a transaction. The supplier pays for some of the costs of the customer's search via advertising, but generally the supplier only pays for one-to-many interactions, while the customer pays for the one-to-one interactions.

The thing is that the customer can afford a few small one-to-one transactions. It's not hard for them. However, the supplier likely wouldn't be able to afford the costs. Lots of one-to-one transactions don't scale.

Re: Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

#12

Post by andrewljohnson »

The only problem with broadcasting my info to a vendor for some patio furniture is that next week they are going to call me about some nice tiki torches. Then, I'm going to get some snail mail from their buddy the BBQ salesman, and his buddy the meat vendor will come a knockin' too.

Then, one of those guys is going to sell my information to totally unrelated businesses, so I'll start get calls from people trying to sell me auto warranties. I'll get endless catalogs from all their combined efforts, and I'll never be able to read email again, because there will be too much spam in it.

Finally, I will end up subscribed to some porno websites I never heard of, and since I don't want to explain that to my girlfriend, I guess I'll just keep using the canvas folding chairs that I have.

Re: Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

#13

Post by raquo »

Hoff wrote: post #7

Adams is describing how marketing (tries to) work. Marketing seeks to identify customers. In a manner of consideration, Adams is seeking to acquire better and more targeted search results, or skills in searching for products or services. Google Adwords tries to offers something close. But the Googlers are not very good at this level of targeting. (Yet?) As for specifically contacting buyers, that's expensive for comm…

But Google is the concierge you're talking about. It has the description of the product on its page, and it has the description of what the shopper wants (your search terms). The algorithms just aren't as smart as a human being, and you rightly pointed that a (smart) human being is expesive.

Re: Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

#16

Post by megamark16 »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #12

The only problem with broadcasting my info to a vendor for some patio furniture is that next week they are going to call me about some nice tiki torches. Then, I'm going to get some snail mail from their buddy the BBQ salesman, and his buddy the meat vendor will come a knockin' too. Then, one of those guys is going to sell my information to totally unrelated businesses, so I'll start get calls from people trying to s…

But if the only way they could contact you was through the specific "want ad" that you posted, wouldn't that help some? You're not asking them to come to you, you're asking them to reply to that ad. They shouldn't need to know anything else about you except what you posted in the ad. This assumes that the Broadcast Shopping company that is acting as the mediator between you and the sellers isn't going to sell your contact information, but that should be made very clear, "Hey, the only way a seller can contact you is through this one ad, and you can turn the ad off as soon as you get the offer you're looking for".

Re: Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

#17

Post by megamark16 »

SandB0x wrote: post #6

So users want a list of items, without massive duplication (many shops selling the same toaster), while at the same time knowing the best price for each item. Seems Amazon have this nailed with their multiple retailer options. Maybe I'm being cynical, but for the site he describes you'd get a whole ecosystem of "recommendation experts" or similar who will auto-spam replies on ToasterCo's behalf, and you'd also end up…

So you institute a ranking algorithm that also watches for spam to insure that all of a particular vendor's replies aren't either the same or just filling in a template with keywords from a request and otherwise the same. That way, if a vendor makes too many unpersonalized offers, they could get warned, lose karma, whatever. Whereas if a vendor really targets someone's needs well, even if they don't have the price or exact item that the buyer wants, that buyer might still shoot them some good karma for trying.

shrug

Re: Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

#19

Post by gr366 »

smallblacksun wrote: post #9

Do people really have trouble finding the things they want to buy online? Whenever I do a search for information on any kind of product, I get a ton of ads offering to sell it to me. This seems like a solution in search of a problem.

I think the point was that there are too many options:

  Now you shop on the Internet, and you can buy from anywhere on the planet.

  The options for any particular purchase approach infinity, or so it seems.
So while you may get tons of ads offering to sell you something, how much effort is spent determining which is the best match for what you want. It would be better to get 5 results that are really close to what you're looking for than 500 that are sort of what you want.

Re: Hunter Becomes the Prey - shopping is broken

#20

Post by davidmathers »

Shorter Scott Adams:

Business idea: beat Google at its own game.

It's just not going to happen. My approach would be to start with the expensive ad-hoc shopping services that already work for rich people and figure out how to standardize, commoditize and mass market them.

Any idea that has an element of "replace humans with ai" to it is ultimately in direct competition with Google. Which means both that your service will not be more useful than Google and that they will crush you whenever they want to.

The path to value, for everyone other than Google and Amazon, is to not replace humans but instead make them more powerful.

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