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Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

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Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#171

Post by sithadmin »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #162
muspimerol wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (hope?) it's the beginning of a long, slow decline for Amazon as a marketplace, unless they fix this. This distrustful sentiment is something I hear from a lot of younger people (<40 year olds). I didn't even notice it myself until recently, but I am buying more and more stuff directly from other niche e-commerce websites, because I know half of the search results on Amazon are a scam.

In NYC, B&H has free next day delivery and many of the same tech products. Microcenter has nice stores and price matches.

B&H has great selection and prices, but man I don't like giving my money to a business that's strongly aligned to Satmar fundamentalism (which perpetrates all manner of social regressivism) and has a history of abusing workers that don't share the management's religion or skin color. I've demoted them to 'retailer of last resort' status for my personal shopping.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#172

Post by bombcar »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #103
KVFinn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search. Ironically Amazon has been so aggressive with the ads recently I've lost all trust in searching on Amazon itself. I'm back to using Google to find the Amazon product page. On Amazon I search for a specific brand and model and it's on page 4, buried unti…

> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size. This exact thing happened to me. One of the problems, was that the bulb I was looking at, had a specific mini-candelabra socket, and the ones they showed me, had one that was just slightly larger, but looked almost identical (and the name was also “mini candelabra”). This was one of those “recommendations,” in the list at the bottom.…

Amazon is rapidly dropping to my second or third place to look, I often start at Home Depot or Best Buy or other places without a marketplace first, then only sanity check Amazon to make sure I can't save somehow.

Same thing happened to eBay, any attempt to cut down on the scammers just reduced the number of actual real sellers, until basically there's nothing but scammers left for large swaths of the site.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#173

Post by pessimizer »

DeathArrow wrote: post #120

I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page. Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website? I think ads play the biggest part in why the Inter…

Imagine having ads in your store for the products that you sell. Disgusting.

edit: or less sarcastically, the problem with Amazon is the trash and counterfeits that they're selling, and that they're willing to promote garbage to the top for cash. It's that Amazon has no respect for its own reputation as a store or a marketplace. It's not that Amazon sells products for money.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#174

Post by Loughla »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #162
muspimerol wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (hope?) it's the beginning of a long, slow decline for Amazon as a marketplace, unless they fix this. This distrustful sentiment is something I hear from a lot of younger people (<40 year olds). I didn't even notice it myself until recently, but I am buying more and more stuff directly from other niche e-commerce websites, because I know half of the search results on Amazon are a scam.

In NYC, B&H has free next day delivery and many of the same tech products. Microcenter has nice stores and price matches.

In the middle of nowhere flyover, B&H has true 2 day delivery for no extra cost. Their prices are competitive with anywhere else as well. It's astounding.

I also like that they close the purchase feature for Shabbat. That feels nice, like a personal touch to an anonymous website.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#175

Post by bombcar »

mschuster91 wrote: post #102
KVFinn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search. Ironically Amazon has been so aggressive with the ads recently I've lost all trust in searching on Amazon itself. I'm back to using Google to find the Amazon product page. On Amazon I search for a specific brand and model and it's on page 4, buried unti…

> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size. Amazon could improve their usability so much by providing proper metadata entry systems for sellers and enforce their proper usage by moderating their platform. But that costs money, there are more than enough customers still buying stuff off of Amazon and the real cash cow is AWS anyway.

The insane thing is just how much meta data you can (and have) to give them to list something, and then the search just goes and ignores it all.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#176

Post by tantalor »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #97

Amazon is really shit now. You try to buy a product and instead of showing you the actual brands it just shows you alibaba scam products. I have to go to other sites and find the actual products and then search directly on amazon. It won’t be long before I just stop using amazon altogether.

> then search directly on amazon

Crazy idea: skip that step, buy somewhere else

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#177

Post by JCM9 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #120

I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page. Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website? I think ads play the biggest part in why the Inter…

> Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps?

Sorry to burst you bubble but this is how all of retail works including physical stores. From the moment you walk into a store everything you see from what products are “on sale” to the floor displays to where on the shelf an item appears is all “an advertisement” paid for by the product maker. The fact that you thought this was all like just a shop keeper assembling items to their preference is quaint. Amazon is simply a digital version of what stores have been doing since essentially the beginning of stores.

That all includes private label too. People criticize Amazon for selling their own products for less than brand names, but walk into any store and you’ll see the same thing with store or house brands. Again, this is all standard retail practice and not some evil new scheme.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#178

Post by TeamMCS »

reinsdyr wrote: post #67
Scarblac wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it will come at least somewhat at the expense of their core business, surely? An Airbnb with ads looks a lot less trustworthy than one without, I think.

I already don't trust airbnb because of their random fees they keep applying after actually putting in my information. And their general unreliability when it comes to supporting hosts and costumers.

One tip you may appreciate is to use the Australian version of airbnb (.au), their regulators require them to show the true cost of the rental, including all fees in the headline price.

It operates exactly the same as your regional airbnb once you switch the location and currency. For example, switching to USD and searching for apartments in California

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#179

Post by bombcar »

scarface74 wrote: post #10
cheeselip420 wrote: post #6

So the companies that sell on Amazon pay money to Amazon (from the revenues they get from Amazon's customers) to have their products listed more favorably than competitors (one of which is actually Amazon). I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...

Or the same thing every company in retail has done forever

The main difference is the retail companies still vet the suppliers before letting them duke it out for shelf space.

Monster may have paid Best Buy to be on the shelf, but at least I have some guarantee that Best Buy actually bothered to check that the HDMI cable is actually an HDMI cable (and if it wasn't, would notice and pull it eventually).

Amazon lets anyone sell anything, and then takes a cut in multiple ways.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#180

Post by [deleted] »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #97

Amazon is really shit now. You try to buy a product and instead of showing you the actual brands it just shows you alibaba scam products. I have to go to other sites and find the actual products and then search directly on amazon. It won’t be long before I just stop using amazon altogether.

[deleted]
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