In the end, we as a society value convenience more than global optima. So we will always land in some local optima. We deserve it.
In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
ByteDance has reimplemented their now infamous video suggestion algorithm for shopping and it is _very_ effective.
Once the infrastructure and logistics of the Chinese eCommerce platforms improve in the US, it will be so much better that I imagine that Bezos only recourse will be to have congress ban them (a la the Chinese EV ban).
He will likely be successful in doing this and allow the US to slide further into modern technological irrelevancy at his own benefit.
What baffles me is that e-commerce sites all tend to get worse with time. The moment a site I like turns into a marketplace, I know it will only go downhill.
These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.
Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.
People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".
It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
Even for the buyer, there are second order consequences if you remove the ability for sellers to effectively sell. If sellers can't effectively ramp, they're going to turn to other platforms. If new sellers can't compete on Amazon, prices will increase and diversity of options will go down.
I'm not saying ads in search are a hard necessity in every platform. I'm just asking people to think through the whole issue before making snap judgments because ads are annoying to them.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.
I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.
Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
My goal has now shifted to identify the thinnest intermediary between my dollars and the person doing the labor for the product/service I'm paying for.
Recently a nice wooden piece from a shop in Germany and an address sign for my yard from some place in the Midwest.
For some things you do see endless shops selling cheap Chinese imports.
Ads too, I guess
In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...)
So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to bring it to my front door? I never got it.
And unfortunately for them... it keeps happening now?
Like every other package that gets delivered?!
(They always believe this, apparently... either that, or their agreement with their delivery insurance services must eat the cost).
I've more than gotten my muffler refunded now and they're none the wiser, so win win really!
I've been a prime account member in good standing for over 5 years now.
I order thousands of dollars worth of stuff every year.
They're not cancelling my account. Ever.
They seriously don't give a shit. They're not paying these costs. It's all covered. They are not the same company who delivers or insures.
It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.
This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.
This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.
Google ads work exactly the same way.
As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.
If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.
("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)
This assertion lacks evidence. An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself. The ad will earn you a click-through to the product, but buyers will begin to back out instead of following through with a purchase. Ad purchases cannot overcome insufficient revenue - it won't be profitable long-term.
Yes, Amazon has a problem with vendors buying good reviews as well. It doesn't overcome a high number of poor reviews, or a high number of returns.
> And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.
Reeks of a conspiracy theory. Most customers simply don't have the time or energy to research any more than the top handful of results. Only a rare person goes 10 pages deep into the search results. Organic search results will produce less traffic when people don't even look at them. But that's not evidence in and of itself that the organic search results were nerfed in some way.
I hate to remind people of the basic truth about modern Amazon, but here goes: the vast majority of the inventory is made in China and the exact same product can be found at a tiny, tiny fraction of the Amazon price on AliExpress and similar sites. The value that Amazon adds is their logistic network that can deliver to domestic US addresses in a day or two, compared to weeks. The difference in price between Amazon and AliExpress justifies sellers spending enormous sums on ads and review purchases, because even if they do sell garbage on Amazon, enough people bought it at such ridiculous margins that the seller can tear down the product with the bad reviews and high return rate and re-offer it under a new brand with the same ad and review purchase strategy and still make a profit. But the person to blame for that is not Amazon, and it's not the seller, it's the fool who decides to pay the ridiculous price compared to the AliExpress price.
Books are one of the categories where they aren't printed in China, they're not sold on AliExpress, and searching for "seth godin the knot" returns the actual correct listing as the first organic search result. So I'm not sure why the author brings his book up as evidence. He might do better by reminding his publisher that "selling on Amazon" is not a homogenous experience and they ought to reconsider flushing money down the drain on advertisements they don't need.
"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.
"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. But there is value to show some noise in the search long term.
Another way to look at it is through the vail of ignorance. Suppose you're a manufacturer of air fryers, but don't know where you stand in terms of how competitive or popular your product is. Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Sure if you're the top 3 manufacturer, maybe you would prefer not to pay the tax. But if you're not, you'd much rather prefer the system in which you can.
It’s very easy to blame systems and other people.
This is a lazy strawman and not what the author of the post argued for.
> It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.
Then maybe contribute to the dialog on that front. The article did so more than your comment setting up a strawman.
I actually prefer Dr. Pepper, but a lot of people think Coke makes the best cola, Apple makes the best laptops, etc.
You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.
If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.
Except, apparently, the surface that's actually closest to the purchasing decision? Why must that surface be forbidden?
> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place
Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.
Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.
(no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)
For the past decade Etsy has been a rebranded Temu/Ali Express. There's almost nothing local, or original, or worth anything on it.
All large online shopping services converge onto the same Amazon model.
Yeah but at the time when I buy it it's gonna have thousands of 5 star reviews, and the images themselves will be the shiniest most beautiful garbage ever seen by mankind.
simonebrunozzi•39m ago
What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.
One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.
I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.
I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.
bluGill•32m ago
You should do what I do: look for someplace else to buy from first. Amazon has "everything" - if you can find it. However there are usually small sellers of that niche (often niche.com) where they know something about the product and will direct your to the best one without adds. The smaller/weirder the niche the more likely this seller is to be helpful. You get to support "the little guy", and get a good product for a good price. Even if Amazon is cheaper, the smaller store is still the better value because you get a good product.
detourdog•24m ago
ungreased0675•30m ago
forestrywat•28m ago
Amazon doesn't need to be so big and in so many industries. My pharmacy doesn't also need to be a movie studio. My cloud provider doesn't also need to be a self publishing business. It distorts too many things.
lostmsu•27m ago
The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.