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Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

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Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#441

Post by DaoVeles »

mvanbaak wrote: post #235
textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it happen. It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing

The question is the cost to value ratio. There is some value in LLM's, the question is if people are willing to foot the cost.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#442

Post by ethbr1 »

Arrath wrote: post #405
ethbr1 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that's Amazon selling your query results, not a failure in search algorithm.

For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations? When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole b…

Or is fuzzy search a convenient excuse for "we consider sellers who advertise with Amazon and subscribe to more of our seller services a valuable factor in search rankings"?

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#443

Post by Spooky23 »

paxys wrote: post #86

The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…

Amazon makes more money on shady tactics than making ordering with that sort of mechanism too expensive.

Check camel camel… Tide pods vary 25% in price, from ok to ridiculous. When Amazon runs out you’ll get subbed with third party seller (probably stolen) product.

If I could use a dash button with Target, I would use it.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#444

Post by philwelch »

swozey wrote: post #240
AlexandrB wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.

Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials. I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such…

What are you talking about? Buy a bag of oranges and a juicer from Costco and you’re set. You can also get 50lb bag of rice, tons of produce, milk, eggs, meat—you don’t need to buy the processed junk foods. In fact I don’t find many stores other than Costco where I can buy e.g. entire cuts of meat to cut into steaks myself.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#445

Post by Spooky23 »

crazygringo wrote: post #210
swatcoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…

This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…

Don’t be baffled… “worlds largest selection” pivoted to worlds largest fence. Financially, the third party product is better for Amazon (no inventory - the third party stuff is a revenue generator!)

How exactly does Spooky23 have the buying power to price competitively with a major retailer? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s cheaper to pay crackheads to loot CVS than to troll for clearance blowouts.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#446

Post by Spooky23 »

supportengineer wrote: post #325
booi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

Prescription drugs have something called "NDC number" ( National Drug Codes ). What we need is NDC numbers but for consumer goods.

Every consumer product has a UPC.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#447

Post by WatchDog »

textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

If OpenAI ends up releasing the GPT-4o voice model they demoed, I feel like I would use it a lot, especially while driving.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#448

Post by Arrath »

ethbr1 wrote: post #442
Arrath wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the sponsored returns to the search query, sure. But for the rest, isn't that the fuzzy search crapping the bed in the face of our expectations? When I specify what I want I want the search to return what I searched for, not a lot of kinda similar junk. I've tried to explain the concept of fuzzy search to my girlfriend a few times and she still gets annoyed when a search for "24"x24" shadow box" returns a whole b…

Or is fuzzy search a convenient excuse for "we consider sellers who advertise with Amazon and subscribe to more of our seller services a valuable factor in search rankings"?

There is that

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#449

Post by b3ing »

juxtaposicion wrote: post #309
booi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

We're building that spreadsheet as a product. I'd love to show you. I'd message you a private link to a prototype but you have no contact info on your profile. If you are interested, can you email or DM me using my profile info?

Oh wow, I’ve had that idea for 14yrs but never wanted to start coding it

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#450

Post by wordpad25 »

alexa_throwaway wrote: post #385
enlyth wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our software could have radically accelerated and improved the Alexa experience basically overnight By improve the Alexa experience, do you mean make it more useful for users or help it shift more chineseware for Amazon? Because as a user, I will never order anything without seeing a picture and reading reviews, voice shopping is dead on arrival If it's the former, I imagine it's Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LL…

It's not Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM. I don't want to give away too many details given that this is a throwaway account, but the way Alexa's ecosystem works is they have "skills" Alexa users can instantiate. Our API would have increased the utility (and therefore usage) of some of the top skills by quite a lot. I think of the Alexa team the same way I think of juiced up bodybuilders who think they can beat u…

>Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is focused on turning around this division, which is a good thing IMO.

If you got 10x bigger aren't they your competitor now or are you still tiny relatively speaking?

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