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Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

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Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#191

Post by philipov »

bradleybuda wrote: post #183
philipov wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Sounds like an antitrust issue. Great example of how it doesn't take full monopoly-scale control for markets to break down.

Maybe Amazon is behaving badly, trying to scam customers by selling them fraud products at inflated prices. Is the best response to that to enlist the federal government to make them run their business differently? Or may we could just, you know, take our business elsewhere?

Taking your business elsewhere only works when individual customers represent a significant proportion of a company's income. With the volume Amazon handles, any individual attempt to send market signals is completely drowned out by noise and marketting. To send such a market signal strongly enough to be received, you would have to have an advertising campaign on the scale of another massive corporation. That indicates market failure. It is well known that markets are not resilient against tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, and similar phenomena.

While I am no fan of the federal government, I am even less of a fan of a federal government that is dwarfed and captured by the power of giant corporate conglomerates, nor am I a fan of corporations large enough to act as governments in their own right. Therefore it is necessary for the size of the largest businesses to not exceed the power of the federal government, and it is necessary for there to be actionable antagonism between the interests of business and government.

Markets can only be free if this balance of scale between public and private interests is maintained.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#192

Post by nkurz »

jrockway wrote: post #57

I might actually be done with Amazon. Every few months, I spend some time searching for the perfect LED light bulbs for my apartment; the built-in fixture requires 6 candelabra-base bulbs. These are hard to find, but there are a few products catering to this market, so I randomly buy stuff to see if I ever get anything good. I found some LEDs that claimed to have a high CRI and were brighter than normal, so I took a…

Sounds like a great review!

Regarding the specific rather than the meta: I'm very satisfied with the "filament LED" candelabra bulbs from Amazon. I've bought several brands, usually whatever is cheapest. I'm even using e12 to e26 adapters in some fixtures so I can standardize on them. There are lots of comparables on Ebay: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=e12+filament+led.

I don't know the actual spectrum, but I like the light quality, and haven't had problems with durability. If you haven't tried this style yet, you should. It's a good design, since it works directly off mains voltage and thus avoids the quick-to-fail heat-sensitive capacitors used in standard LED bulbs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_filament

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#193

Post by eganist »

chrisper wrote: post #85
eganist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall this being on my list. Remind me?

It's the first response to your second link.

Ah, sadly I'm not a seller, so that's not something I've explored. You should follow up with the original commenter.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#194

Post by dawnerd »

apersona wrote: post #102
ckastner wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bezos is out to make an empire, everything else comes second. I share this sentiment. For comparison, I believe the amount of and methods with which Google collects data to be wrong, but I also believe that they don't believe they are doing something (outright) wrong. Amazon, however, must know that they have a counterfeit goods problem, but it seems that they couldn't care less about it. Same applies to gaming the…

How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems? It seems like a hard problem - eBay suffered from this too for their goods,Yelp with reviews. I doubt it's just a "I don't care" kind of thing.

You don’t allow third party sellers and the problem goes away real fast.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#195

Post by dawnerd »

LinuxBender wrote: post #161
apersona wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you solve the counterfeit goods and preventing people from gaming the review system problems? It seems like a hard problem - eBay suffered from this too for their goods,Yelp with reviews. I doubt it's just a "I don't care" kind of thing.

I don't believe you can stop this. I have tried and failed. I steer clear of anything not shipped directly from Amazon. Trying to report shady sellers on Amazon is next to impossible and Amazon will not remove them.

The counterfeit items come from items shipped from amazon too thanks to their commingling inventory.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#197

Post by laumars »

gbersac wrote: post #168
tfha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I've been unhappy to see Bezos gaining steam. As his other products become more successful, you can expect a lot more of this. Alexa is not your friend, Alexa is a tool to make Amazon money. Amazon's move into media is not an effort to improve the media system, it's a recognition that there's a lot of money to be made by controlling the media that people consume. Same thing with the fire phone, it wasn't…

Welcome to capitalism. People are not in business to be nice, but to make money. Their behaviour is expected and the same as most private actors.

The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. Plenty of businesses pride themselves on customer satisfaction with the knowledge that happy customers are frequent customers.

The problem is the American free market model encourages market capture through "less noble" (for want a better description) means; it encourages monopolies and discourages regulation nor oversight thus allowing businesses to ignore all other consumer, social and even ecological concerns. In an ideal world market forces would filter out that bad from the good but we've seen time and time again that you simply cannot trust businesses to do "the right thing" - and why should we, they're a business not a social club! But the fact remains it gets increasingly hard to compete in any market when your competitor has comparatively infinite resources and zero scruples. That results in a net less for consumers and society in the more general sense too.

At least here in the Europe we have the EU who are willing to challenge companies who are proven to overstep. I'm not saying the EU get it right all of the time but better that than giving businesses free reign to do whatever the hell they like.

Anyhow, I've waffled on about a fair few points so to get back on topic: You do businesses who are customer-focused. The problem is they usually get overshadowed by the businesses that have learned to play the game better / more aggressively.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#198

Post by tjr225 »

elhudy wrote: post #120
SteveCoast wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you saved $4.40 to go to Walmart. * There's a non-zero chunk of the population not near a Walmart or similar. * It costs time to go there * It costs vehicle depreciation So if you were going to Walmart anyway, or walked there with nothing better to do you saved the money. But if you didn't then let's say the average wage is $25/hour or so and you spent 30 minutes there and back, and fully loaded vehicle depreciati…

You did a great job nailing the fiscal loss associated with going to Walmart - but with those aside, I would gladly pay $5 to not have to show face at Walmart.

Amazon is equally repulsive.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#199

Post by dawnerd »

kd5bjo wrote: post #181
arbuge wrote: post #19

Their basic underlying assumption appears to be that they're no longer in danger of losing customers and can now act accordingly. Now that they've captured 50%+ of US ecommerce, they've also raised many prices, to the point where they're far from the cheapest price in many cases. A random example... the cat litter I just purchased is $17.89 at Amazon, $13.49 at Walmart. Last week I bought a chair mat for $21.95 on Eb…

Walmart has a history making suppliers cut costs to the point that quality has to drop. Often, suppliers will produce inferior goods for Walmart, and mark them the same as the high-quality goods they sell to other retailers. I've actually wondered how many of Amazon's "counterfeit" items are genuine Walmart-class products commingled with Macy's-class products in Amazon's warehouses.

You think Macy’s is getting higher quality goods? Hah, that’s too funny.

Re: Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads

#200

Post by nkurz »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #156
jrockway wrote: post #57

I might actually be done with Amazon. Every few months, I spend some time searching for the perfect LED light bulbs for my apartment; the built-in fixture requires 6 candelabra-base bulbs. These are hard to find, but there are a few products catering to this market, so I randomly buy stuff to see if I ever get anything good. I found some LEDs that claimed to have a high CRI and were brighter than normal, so I took a…

Downvoting this because it's irrelevant to the topic at hand (Amazon is stuffing search results pages with ads). It's your right to free-associate all amazon gripes onto this thread, but I'll just use the system to indicate that they are noise to me.

The downvote is fine, but the comment explaining it is excessive. Different people will have different senses of what's relevant vs irrelevant. Although this specific article is about ads on Amazon, I'm personally more interested in the larger question of why/whether Amazon is shooting themselves in the foot with bad policy choices. As such, 'jrockway' was on topic for me.
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