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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

#501

Post by jonhohle »

booi wrote: post #220
crazygringo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I worked at Amazon when Fresh was rolling out in Seattle. A coworker thought he was ordering 10 bananas but when his order arrived he received 10 bunches of bananas.

Generously, he brought them in to share along with the story. I’m sure they made a lot of banana bread the following week.

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

#502

Post by akira2501 »

39896880 wrote: post #170
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.

The Kirkland house brand is often backed by one of the name brands they sell. They have quality metrics for Kirkland and they check the products regularly. If the quality dips, they swap out the provider.

I think it's the other way around. Kirkland takes the "B quality stock" and sells it under it's own label. This is why they have an essentially no questions asked return policy. If the quality dips it eats into this margin and the provider is back to making next to nothing on units that fail to pass their own more stringent brand QA checks.

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

#503

Post by mbajkowski »

apwell23 wrote: post #386
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…

> Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things. What about 'subscribe and save' on amazon. I never use it, but curious if it has a similar fate as ordering on alexa.

Good question. Seems to suffer from same fate. Spot checking 2 years of order history across 2 common personal care products shows at least a 30% variation in price

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

#504

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#505

Post by akira2501 »

fuzztester wrote: post #451
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…

>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. is there anything wrong with that? I kind of thought that is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits.

> is there anything wrong with that?

Yes. They are losing billions on the deal and consumers didn't have their expectations met.

> is one of the main reasons for the existence of companies, that is, to increase sales, and hopefully, profits

You're describing the main reason for owning one. This has nothing to do with why we collectively allow them to exist.

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

#506

Post by acchow »

philodelta wrote: post #152
S0y wrote: post #113

>Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee. That's actually really funny to read. Just last night I was watching my brother cook and he asked Alexa to set a timer (It's pretty much the only thing he uses it for...) I jokingly said "You know, that's a really expen…

don't get me wrong, it is silly, but also being able to set a timer without touching anything with your gross cooking hands is unironically a wonderful feature.

Your iPhone can already do this.

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

#507

Post by creato »

linsomniac wrote: post #273
mschuster91 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation. Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and tha…

Here in the US with Amazon it will usually give you a price per quantity, though that can vary between "each", "oz", etc... The real issue being complained about is that there may be 10 listings in Amazon for "Tide Pods", so if you say to Alexa "Order Tide Pods" you aren't sure what you'll get, what quantity, or what price. Amazon REALLY needs to do some product normalization. It is true that if you go into a grocery…

> They try this with things like screws,

“Try” being the key word, because it is useless. It maybe could work if vendors populated the metadata correctly, but they don’t, and amazon put far too many similar categories into it, so you can’t actually filter on most of the parameters without filtering out most of the options you wanted to see, or selecting dozens of options.

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

#509

Post by mkl »

tgma wrote: post #361
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fun. The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility. I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place. In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague i…

Can you think of any downside of that proposal at all? Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.

Tax-exclusive prices hide the true cost and encourage overspending by making things falsely appear cheaper. Their purpose is for businesses to squeeze more from their customers.

In NZ the price you see is the price you pay. The sales tax amount is always clearly stated on receipts, invoices, checkouts, online carts, etc. (by law) and the rate has changed twice in history, so everyone knows when it happens and who is responsible. Everything is explicit and nothing is or can be hidden (we don't do tipping either). In comparison when I visited the USA I never knew how much I would be paying for things, which felt fundamentally unfair and customer-opposed.

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

#510

Post by samplatt »

ipaddr wrote: post #412
crazygringo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have one supplier of a book. You have many suppliers of generic products. Target gets from one supplier. The multi vender estore offers something different. The low prices, large selection more supplied inventory are some benefits.

Not just many suppliers of generic products, but suppliers come and go on an almost weekly basis thanks to always choosing the cheapest, suppliers going out of business, etc. Hooray capitalism.
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