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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

#611

Post by asfodelsu »

xp84 wrote: post #600
pmontra wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like: #1: $0.37 / ounce #2: $6.50 / pound or even: #3: $1.82 / each (a price per item) This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but i…

In many places in Europe: Normal price per item big letters, price per Kg small letters. Problem solved

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

#612

Post by 1oooqooq »

pmontra wrote: post #580
mlsu wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

but even with the label you don't know if the cheaper one is full of sugar or is mostly water etc... there's no escape.

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

#613

Post by 1oooqooq »

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.

funny, bananas were the only thing they greatly lowered price (and quality) when they took over wholefoods.

before you had .8/lb and 1.2/lb true organic from south America. after you had both bins failed with the the same Asian chiquita, but the fresher ones labeled organic and they cost .8 and .6 per lb.

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

#614

Post by tsimionescu »

WalterBright wrote: post #595
tsimionescu wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Taxes are not set by supply & demand. > they can take a hit to their margin instead Not for long. Low margin businesses tend to go out of business. And if you can earn 5% buying bonds, why run a business that has an ROI of 4%?

The point is that supply and demand works on the final price, not on "price before tax". Especially when taxes are proportional, so if you offer a lower price than your competitor, you also pay less of it to the state in taxes. So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism. Showing price without tax is then obviously a scam to try to attack your psychology to think it's cheaper. They could just as well show price - marketing costs.

Of course, if businesses actually set prices as cost + margin, then it does make sense to separate tax from the price, as the value "price before tax" is a meaningful part of the price setting algorithm.

And lowering your margin is not the same thing as running a low margin business. If your margin was 20% at a tax level of 10%, and taxes go to 15%, then reducing your margin to 18% doesn't make you a low margin business now. Regardless, if you believe in supply and demand as the sole mechanism for price setting, this is all moot: the state increasing taxes won't increase demand or reduce supply with the exact same level as the tax increase, so the price can't move the exact same as the tax increase in this model.

I'd also note that it's not strictly true that taxes are completely decoupled from supply & demand. States do compete on attracting businesses through lower taxation.

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

#615

Post by 1oooqooq »

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…

that's your guess and what they tell investors.

my guess is sheer incompetency hidden by sales volume.

at some point they had the idea of translating the search to categories and showing alternatives. it got both unmaintained and other products teams added their own self interest on top of the algo and now you have the worst search on the planet which nobody have the political power to fix because it touches everyone revenue, even if for worse

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

#616

Post by akira2501 »

fuzztester wrote: post #519
akira2501 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> is there anything wrong with that? >Yes. They are losing billions on the deal biz 101: losses in business commonly happen anytime. losses are not wrong or right. they just happen, for various reasons. it is called an occupational hazard. if getting profits all the time was guaranteed, every tom, dick and harry would be running a business. so companies know about the possibility of losses before they start up. >and…

> biz 101

Don't make 8 generations of products that do not profit while simultaneously changing nothing other than their form factor.

> companies don't do businesses for that reason.

I didn't say they did. Perhaps you should slow down and use fewer insults while you craft your replies. In any case, if you are losing money and customers are happy, that's certainly different than losing money and customers are not happy. Would you not agree this is "sheer common knowledge" as well?

> and skirting my question.

The product is a full decade old. This does not seem to factor into your question or arguments at all. Perhaps it should?

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

#617

Post by hnbad »

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…

What the replies seem missing is that books are not just the thing Amazon started with but also subject to regulation around pricing in places like Germany, which Amazon sells in. The reason they seem to have good and consistent data on many books is that it's necessary in order to avoid violating laws and regulations.

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

#618

Post by dacryn »

tgma wrote: post #470
WalterBright wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period Such regulations make products more expensive. I'm constantly offered warranties when I buy online. I don't want to be forced to buy them, as I don't need them.

Not sure why you're downvoted. There is material difference in prices of electronics due to whatever reason (taxes, warranties, low scale, etc) to the degree that my European friends often purchase laptops and iPhones when they travel to US.

those times have long been gone. Warranties were not the driving factor, but taxes and exchange rates.

Today, the price difference is negligible on most hardware (smaller than $50 on MSRP on an iPhone if you compare New York to Paris for example)

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

#619

Post by pmontra »

regularfry wrote: post #604
xp84 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like: #1: $0.37 / ounce #2: $6.50 / pound or even: #3: $1.82 / each (a price per item) This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but i…

It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion. Non-metric units are just icing on the cake.

I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold.

It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.

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

#620

Post by 8A51C »

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…

My mum has told me about her shopping habits in the 70s, she would have a list of everything they needed, she would walk around the first shop writing all the prices down. She would walk around the second shop buying the items that were cheaper, then return to the first shop to buy what was cheaper there.
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