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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

#571

Post by Phiwise_ »

dsclough wrote: post #520
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…

The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine. How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically…

If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.

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

#572

Post by sholladay »

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…

This seems like such a solvable problem. It only requires some profile setup.

Take the most commonly re-ordered items on Amazon (paper towels, toothbrushes, etc) and have the user select a preferred product, brand, and fallback for each one, as well as a maximum price. Some of that is already implemented for Subscribe & Save and Whole Foods delivery/pickup orders. They could even leverage that existing system.

For less common items, first check the user’s purchase history for something similar and announce if the price has increased more than few percentage points or is not in a normal range for the product category.

That will cover a lot of cases. For the rest, refer the user to do some research on the computer.

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

#573

Post by tsimionescu »

WalterBright wrote: post #377
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…

The tax exclusive prices lets you know how much the government is soaking you, rather than hiding it and blaming it on the business.

So you believe that prices are set by supply and demand and nothing else in all of your other discussions, but when it comes to taxes, it's the government's fault?

When a tax hike happens, businesses don't automatically have to increase prices they charge by the same amount: they can take a hit to their margin instead. So, the price they choose to charge is not "price + tax". It is "supply-and-demand price, of which we pay X to the state in taxes".

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

#574

Post by oblio »

toasterlovin wrote: post #538
ryandrake wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you search for the exact item, including the brand name and the size, you get pages and pages of choices, many of them just wrong. I just did a search for "sprayway glass cleaner 19 oz 1 pack". This contains all the information you need to uniquely identify a single product. Brand, Product, Size, Quantity. Yet Amazon returns 3 pages of crap , including Wrong Brand, Wrong Product, Wrong Size, and Wrong Quantit…

Their search result page is just a ranking of whatever they predict will sell best based on your query (based on units, not dollars). It’s stupidly simlistic, actually: if we sell more for a given search term because we’re advertising hard on that search term, our organic ranking for that term will rise almost immediately. So in your case, what’s going on is that basically other people who search with the same term e…

It's not stupidly simplistic. It's ads. Random no names bid for keywords to be placed on those pages, the higher the better. Good luck discerning actual ads from the real listings.

Payola.

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

#575

Post by oblio »

dchftcs wrote: post #559
maccard wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference with a store is that if tide pods should be ~$8 for a pack, the dtore is incredibly unlikely to have one pack of tide pods on the shelf for $70

In some cases the retail store just doesn't list the price and the store owner may just come up with a highly marked-up price when asked. 10x would be very rare though indeed.

That only happens in shady mom and pop corner stores where laws are not enforced. Most countries force price listing and it's trivial to get caught.

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

#576

Post by sofal »

lancesells wrote: post #452
linsomniac wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not saying Alexa would be used more, but what if it confirmed with you on either the quantity or the last quantity of the item you ordered? "The same order of Tide Pods as last time?"

You can get burned real bad by this if the specific product SKU gets discontinued and the price spikes 10x because now they're called Tide Pods Original.

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

#577

Post by Arn_Thor »

tgma wrote: post #357
mschuster91 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe. Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases? In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you. [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...

Yes I am aware and I stand by my statement. Have you actually returned stuff to stores over there? I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.

How many half eaten cakes would you have to return to monetarily make up for, say, a PC or washing machine that stops working after 4 ½ years? Because you can get that device replaced or repaired in much of Europe, for free. I'm not aware of any US company that offers such a warranty window and actually keeps its word (look at crappy fridges where the company will replace one faulty unit for another with the same problem once, and then you're on your own). And even if some did, they are by far the minority. The voluntary "I'm a good brand, choose me" freebies offered by a company will almost never outmatch that mandated by regulation.

The reason is simple: the companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money for shareholders as possible, and if it's marginally cheaper to shorten the warranty period (whithouth seeming out of touch with the rest of the market), the bulk will choose that. Whereas the aim of regulation is always to secure the interest of the consumer. I say "always", but there are exceptions in cases of regulatory capture, which admittedly is much of the US...

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

#578

Post by ssl-3 »

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 buy a lot of household stuff from Amazon. I also buy a lot of household stuff from lots of other places, mostly bricks-and-mortar.

I don't keep a spreadsheet. I find that when I buy a thing enough times (a particular size of a particular shampoo, say), I get a vague feel for what it "should" cost, and I definitely have a range of values around that expected cost that may be acceptable to me. I don't need a spreadsheet for this. (A spreadsheet wouldn't hurt at all, but it just isn't necessary for me; I don't want to spend the time to get that level of accuracy since the return on my time isn't there for me.)

But sometimes, an item is relatively unfamiliar or the price "feels" somewhat high or low -- whether at Amazon or locally.

When this happens, I comparison shop. I've gotten pretty quick at it.

Charts of historic Amazon pricing for things -- often pretty good but sometimes with large granularity -- are available at camelcamelcamel.com, which scrapes Amazon pricing and has done so for quite a long time.

So I look there to see if Amazon's price is good, relative to Amazon's previous pricing.

And then, if I still haven't found clear direction, I fire up Instacart's website. This lets me search many local stores all at once. (Their prices are often [but not always] inflated, but that's easy to get a feel for as well.)

After that, I have enough vaguely-accurate data to say to myself "Self, this shampoo is a terrible deal at Amazon and I'll just pick some up at the store," or "Self, this shampoo is a fantastic deal at Amazon, and I should order one or two extra bottles while it is cheap."

I wish Amazon's prices were more consistent (why is it $13 this week for a 24-pack of cans of V8 juice delivered to my door, and $60 the next week?), but meh. I can deal with it, as long as I have a real computer or time to fiddle with my pocket supercomputer. It's not so different from conventional "shopping."

I just can't deal with it using an Echo speaker and the limited interactions possible with Amazon's broken Alexa "AI". That's a non-starter, as things are today.

---

In terms of quantities, I don't think I've ever been surprised by Amazon. I do not think I've never experienced a thing on Amazon like my parents once did, where they bought mustard at a wholesale club ("Wow, 208 ounces [or whatever] of mustard! What a great price!") and wound up with several hundred individual packets of Heinz mustard loose-packed in a cardboard box.

They were pretty surprised by this. Discussions were had. "What will we ever do with these mustard packets? Should we take it back? What if they refuse to accept it? Is it even worth the money to drive over there again just for this? We still need mustard right now, too..."

They elected to keep it, and that wasn't the end of the world at all: We had plenty of mustard for a very long time, and it was indeed priced right; it just wasn't packaged in a particularly good way for what we were using it for.

(But then, maybe that experience when I was a kid made a lasting impression on me. And perhaps this was reinforced every time I went to retrieve some mustard from that huge box, wherein: I looked at that box. And when I looked at that box, I could always see that it was neatly labeled from the factory and that the contents wouldn't be surprising at all to anyone who was actually paying enough attention.

It is entirely possible that I might automatically scrutinize the offerings at Amazon, and also at the local grocery store, more than others do.)

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

#579

Post by ssl-3 »

jonhohle wrote: post #501
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.

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.

Same, but different.

I once ordered qty. 6 bananas from Instacart, expecting one fairly-medium bunch of bananas to show up with about 6 fruits in that bunch. The listing clearly showed that it was for "quantity", not "weight."

But I got 6 pounds of bananas, which is a ton for a single person living by themself. [And I don't bake, so I got plenty of fresh potassium that week.]

It only happened once. After that, I started leaving careful notes that describe each item where quantity/volume/weight might be confusing and things have been fine.

(I could have complained and Instacart would have rubber-stamped a refund for that part of the order without discussion, but it wasn't worth that much effort.)

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

#580

Post by pmontra »

mlsu wrote: post #553
dsclough wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine. How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically…

It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online. I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement. Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to a…

> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store

Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.

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