Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by ant6n » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 10:50 AM UTC

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…

Plus, Amazons search is garbage. Available items that exactly match the query get ignored. Actually the query only vaguely resembles the results. There is basically no filter functionality (even simple things like which item I can get tomorrow), and the few filters that do exist are ignored. It's like they're playing some funny psycho game with you in order to make you buy stuff that's not quite what you want, even though they do have what you want.

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

#652

Post by rkachowski » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 10:52 AM UTC

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…

It's absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout).

These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"

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

#653

Post by LordKeren » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 10:55 AM UTC

matrix87 wrote: post #389

LordKeren wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by design— the rhetoric around crypto was specifically tailored to emulate all the new-exciting-tech talking points in an attempt to get new people to buy in to the market and prop up the next rug pull. Every new culturally significant tech is going to sound like crypto from now on. And ultimately I think it is too easy to cynically look at all tech hype through the lens of crypto. I think it is pretty fair t…

> I think it is pretty fair to say that LLMs have already achieved several magnitudes more real use cases than crypto ever did. If you include black market economic activity, then crypto has done way more and over a much longer period

> If you include black market economic activity

I don’t

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

#654

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 11:15 AM UTC

asfodelsu wrote: post #611

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…

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

[deleted]

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

#655

Post by d0gsg0w00f » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 11:22 AM UTC

Tcepsa wrote: post #569

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 (…

LOL, makes me think of something more like putting in an order on a stock exchange: Alexa, what's the current price of a small box of Tide Pods? A box of 10 Tide Pods costs $5 Alexa, place a limit order for a box of 10 Tide Pods at $5 to expire at the end of the day if not filled, and notify me when it is filled. If I can order you a box of 10 Tide Pods for $5 or less today, I will do so and notify you. ...time passe…

I love this idea.

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

#656

Post by Gravityloss » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 11:23 AM UTC

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 you look at the list of top online stores after Amazon, many are brands with also physical stores. One would assume they are less shammy. I know if I go to a regular supermarket here, great effort has been spent by the buyers and the organization to ensure that everything is actually of decent quality. Even the cheapest alternatives. That cost of course I then have to pay in the price of the products.

I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts).

I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.

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

#657

Post by NotMichaelBay » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 11:27 AM UTC

fuzztester wrote: post #527

smt88 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa shopping was intended to be voice only . Of course people order things with their voice after they've seen them or read a menu.

how about IVR? or an advanced, literally voice-only version of it, where you don't even have to press any digit keys to respond to voice menus? heh. maybe I should become a consultant to Jeff, charge him gigabucks.

IVR is not a good example because it's an annoying interface that people sometimes have to deal with when calling companies. It actually offers pretty poor UX, because users sometimes know what they want when calling but have to wait to hear the options before making a selection. But it's the best we have for over-the-phone interfaces.

Are you someone who orders things using the Echo? If not, are you just playing devil's advocate?

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

#658

Post by naravara » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 11:28 AM UTC

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…

I was excited about the brief wave of startup grocery stores that were selling zero/minimally packaged staple goods, like “The Rounds.” But it seems like they’re just not able to hit a level of scale to where they can be price competitive with the sneaky dark patterned stores.

So I guess I’m sticking to Aldi.

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

#659

Post by netsharc » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 11:29 AM UTC

asfodelsu wrote: post #611

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…

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

I've seen the "unit price" be per 100g (Especially so you don't notice it's a ton of money per kg) so there's still some screwing around...

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

#660

Post by kruador » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 11:29 AM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #619

regularfry wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The UK switched from selling petrol in gallons to litres in the 1980s. I think I just about recall petrol prices suddenly changing dramatically when I was fairly young - I used to help my Dad keep records of how much fuel we'd bought at what price. I'd write down the figures in the book while he went to pay (it was always self-service) so I must have been old enough to be left alone for 5 minutes!

This Energy Institute statistical series - https://knowledge.energyinst.org/search/record?id=58969 - says that their records changed from "new pence per gallon" to "new pence per litre" at the start of 1989. That seems late for my recollection.

Looking back at historical data from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-..., it appears that the average price for "4 star" petrol (97 RON) crossed the £1 per gallon threshold some time in 1979 (Table 4.1.3, and multiply by 4.54609). I'm not old enough to remember that!

By 1989, prices were at 168.8 pence per litre (i.e. £1.68). So I think the story about the change being because it had gone over £1 per gallon has to be a myth. However, retailers certainly weren't complaining about the price displayed being less than one quarter of what it had been! In contrast, they were much less happy about prices per kilogram being more than twice the price per pound (weight).

Prices crossed £1 per litre for 'Premium Unleaded' (95 RON) in November 2007. They fell back below this level in November 2008 but went back up over it in June 2009.