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The Amazon tax

• simonebrunozzi 29d ago
  This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example. 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.
  • ungreased0675 29d ago
    I don’t give Amazon my money, that’s something most people have the agency to do. There are many, many other places to order from on the internet.
  • bluGill 29d ago
    > What can we do about it? Not much. 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 29d ago
      Usually I can purchase directly from the company that makes the product website.
      • bluGill 29d ago
        Sometimes. Larger companies will not do that since it makes the places that sell most of their things mad to have to compete with the manufacture. (or sometimes they intentionally price such that others can undercut them). Mostly I don't do this because I don't know which company makes the one I want. An independent third party that knows the product and sells several different versions from different companies can help me select which one is best for me. This is a valuable service - when you can find it.
  • forestrywat 29d ago
    It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned. 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.
    • apercu 29d ago
      Yea, we really only need to enforce the laws and regulations on the books.
  • lostmsu 29d ago
    The ads make sense in capitalism. Without the described effect products would never change. Payment for ads ensures discovery works in adversarial free market. The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.
• murzynalbinos 29d ago
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• tchalla 29d ago
  Principal agent problem combined with a monopoly, what could go wrong? 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.
  • summarybot 29d ago
    Speak for yourself haha. Unconscious and unexamined behaviors hardly constitute a value system.
    • forestrywat 29d ago
      Unconscious values are still values.
    • tchalla 29d ago
      I will just leave this here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
  • runarberg 29d ago
    I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else. In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.
    • tchalla 29d ago
      > And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else. In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement. It’s very easy to blame systems and other people.
      • runarberg 29d ago
• automatic6131 29d ago
  Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.
  • jordanpg 29d ago
    Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.
    • rokkamokka 29d ago
      That's the real issue
  • gdulli 29d ago
    This plus the login-walled reviews is unfortunate because once I stopped buying from Amazon I'd continue to go there to browse before buying elsewhere.
    • behringer 29d ago
      The amount of review spam is so high that for a good portion of products the reviews are useless.
      • 0x262d 29d ago
        They also keep making it more annoying to even get to and read the reviews. It feels like it gets more hidden at the bottom of the page every few months. What a shame! Imagine how useful it could be.
        • everybodyknows 29d ago
          One reason they force lots of scrolling is to put friction between you and the more-trustworthy Sort By Recent and Critical Only buttons.
• the_real_cher 29d ago
  Whats going to be hilarious is if brick and mortar companies become popular again because of the painful U.I., scammy companies, and broken search of Amazon.
  • forinti 29d ago
    That's just not going to happen. You have to go out in the rain or heat, pay for parking, maybe not find what you want, pay 30% more than online, so online still has advantages. 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.
    • Ekaros 29d ago
      Must be some MBA thing. Must maximise revenue in every possible way. I have still no idea why the local white goods (and everything else) seller decided it was smart idea to pollute their own product search by becoming marketplace. I am going to you because well you are not that horrible and actually have store near me.
• InsideOutSanta 29d ago
  See also: ads for apps in app stores. 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.
  • teekert 29d ago
    Apple should really be ashamed of itself. But alas, corporations don't have shame, Steve would have been ashamed though.
    • visarga 29d ago
      App Store is a wasteland, I don't think there are more than 100 good apps in millions. All want in-app-purchase, none is fair to give me an upfront price. I don't want for example my kids being bugged to buy apps that cost $100/week.
  • Sivart13 29d ago
    It's completely insane to me that the first search for Okta in the app store isn't the actual Okta app, it's a half-page ad for something that could easily be confused with the Okta app substitute for literally any business name Sure, I know the right one to click on, if I'm in a sound state of mind. What if I'm sleepy? Stressed? 65+ years old?
• paytonjjones 29d ago
  > They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one 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.
  • Georgelemental 29d ago
    The problem TFA is complaining about isn't ads in general, but specifically ads in Amazon search results for products sold on Amazon.
    • paytonjjones 29d ago
      Amazon is a two-sided marketplace. Why should their obligation in search be 100% to one side? 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.
  • cjs_ac 29d ago
    The article isn't an attack on advertising to bring awareness of your product to an unaware market; it's an attack on being made to pay for a customer who has specifically asked for your product to be shown your product.
  • Forgeties79 29d ago
    The problem is we aren’t in a world of more “reasonable” advertising. What we see deployed now are basically weapons-grade manipulation systems, and upstarts do not have equal access to the arsenal. So yeah, they need to get the word out, but they can’t even do that! The big dogs get better, more privileged access.
• nalekberov 29d ago
  Amazon has the most useless search I know. Also, idk who clicks those 'Sponsored' results, but for me they are an automatic pass. But then again Amazon is such a scumbag company that uses its own brands as a weapon to make sellers pay to be visible.
• genghisjahn 29d ago
  Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.
• geerlingguy 29d ago
  It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up. 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.
  • abixb 29d ago
    Enshittification is such a perfect word for all this. Cory Doctorow is a word magician.
    • inigyou 29d ago
      There's also the less neologistic phrase "worse on purpose"
  • radicality 29d ago
    Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
    • mynameajeff 29d ago
      I was recently looking for a cheap IOT camera in a specific form factor from aliexpress and the results were so irrelevant I had to develop alternative strategies like finding one good result and checking under its recommendations or image searching from the one good result to see other using the same picture.
• abixb 29d ago
  I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. 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.
  • JKCalhoun 29d ago
    eBay is my first go-to.
    • adolph 29d ago
      publicsurplus.com has everything a person might need and you are supporting local government. You can find yourself a nice laptop for cheap. "It's got a cop CPU, an i5 10th gen. It's got cop RAM, cop SSD, cop 12v power input."
      • JKCalhoun 29d ago
        New to me.
      • coredog64 29d ago
        Fix the cigarette lighter
  • snarf21 29d ago
    Generally curious but a lot of the stuff I find on Etsy is the same crap from Alibaba/Amazon .. What are you buying from Etsy that isn't this?
    • abixb 29d ago
      I look for independent artists and craftspeople. I recent bought a pack of sci-fi posters for my apartment from an artists who designs it herself and who has an independent reputation. 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.
• 83457 29d ago
  When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
  • stickfigure 29d ago
    OH MY GOD this completely fixes the problem. All the ad noise is gone. This needs to be pinned as the top comment. Thank you!
  • aftergibson 29d ago
    Results do seem better.. What in this instance, does "Best Sellers" mean?
    • 0x262d 29d ago
      One would hope it means it sorts by sales volume.
      • olyjohn 29d ago
        Best for you, or best for Amazon is the question.
  • awakeasleep 29d ago
    of course, the best seller is usually whoever has spent the most on advertising
    • computerdork 29d ago
      Mostly agree with this. Because what the article is saying is that it at least skews the best sellers towards those who spend more on ads.
  • JKCalhoun 29d ago
    "Featured", ha ha. Should rename to "Paid For by Ads".
• jmartrican 29d ago
  Maybe we need ad blockers for Amazon ads.
• cainxinth 29d ago
  Has anyone found a useable fake review detector since Fakespot and Review Meta went down?
• t1234s 29d ago
  Always best to search across Amazon, Ebay and Walmart. Vendors sell the same stuff across all three channels.
• wolttam 29d ago
  I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead Ads too, I guess
• t1234s 29d ago
  Prime is a waste of money. I find most stuff arrives in 2-3 days and its easy to spend the minimum to get free shipping.
  • paxys 29d ago
    I feel at least in major urban areas Amazon’s delivery network is efficient enough that they have to artificially delay non-Prime orders. I order from Amazon only occasionally, and while sometimes there’s actual step-by-step tracking I’ll usually see no movement at all for 3+ days, and suddenly the item has dispatched from the warehouse and it is reaching my house in an hour.
  • apercu 29d ago
    I've learned that I don't need anything in 2-3 days typically anyway.
• johnnyApplePRNG 29d ago
  Amazon has no mercy, so neither do I. 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!
  • forsalebypwner 29d ago
    They don't "always believe this", this will lead to your account being banned eventually, or at least barred from returning products.
    • ButlerianJihad 29d ago
      I certainly hope so. GP implies that they are committing fraud to "stick it to the man". Nine times out of ten, this simply results in the man sticking it to us again.
      • deleted 29d ago
        [deleted]
      • johnnyApplePRNG 29d ago
        Amazon is not "the man". They are for-profit corporation, not our government. There's a difference.
        • mthoms 29d ago
          The phrase "the man" means (roughly) "the establishment". The two biggest components of that are the government and big corporations.
• jacobn 29d ago
  The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great. 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)
• solatic 29d ago
  > It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks. 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.
  • MetaMalone 29d ago
• realty_geek 29d ago
  Would love a similar post breaking down the rightmove (UK equivalent of zillow) tax. Fortunately there is currently a court case against them that might help. I am also starting a #RightmoveHygiene campaign to encourage people to spend less time on there.
• siliconc0w 29d ago
  I'm hoping AI will disintermediate most retail and we'll finally get an aggregator that isn't going to add a tax on both sides of the market. "Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor
  • nemomarx 29d ago
    How much do you think the ai providers will take as a cut for that?
  • chii 29d ago
    and what stops the amazons of the world from paying the ai provider, and getting your ai to buy from them instead of the best deal? How are you going to check and verify you got the best deal? In the recent past, there was a browser extension called "Honey", which purported to find and apply the best coupon code for you when you online shopped. Turned out they were actually (amongst other things), in cahoots with the shops by ensuring that you get only a modest discount, rather than the best available coupons (and this was paid for by the shop).
  • demibabs 29d ago
    Unfortunately, Cuisinart is that year’s official air fryer sponsor of ChatGPT so you’re getting that one!
  • abeppu 29d ago
    Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right? I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to target a query, they'll eventually need to target a vector and its neighborhood, and there will be some greater opacity facing advertisers trying to match "middle-income US users shopping for airfryers who have product height limits posed by kitchen upper cabinets" or something.
• bartek_gdn 29d ago
  "If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place)" 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.
  • deleted 29d ago
    [deleted]
  • charlie-83 29d ago
    Yes. Technically, there are situations where the air fryer which is best for you and the air fryer that makes Amazon the most money are the same. However, with the number of airfryers on Amazon it seems safe to assume this is a rare coincidence.
• visarga 29d ago
  No wonder Amazon sued Perplexity to forbid agents on their site, agents could cut through the crap and find what users wanted instead of what Amazon peddles. They even won the suit. I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.
• bko 29d ago
  > The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. "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.
  • astonex 29d ago
    Isn't that what independent reviews are generally useful for? To try all the options and share feedback for someone to make their own choice.
    • bko 29d ago
      How do you get someone to review your product if you're one of N? Paid reviews? Not independent anymore. Paying money to get some exposure and sales is the best of all bad options.
    • mattmatheus 29d ago
      Yes, if you can even get your product high enough on the rankings to make a sale. The incumbent has a massive advantage, making it harder for a new (but better) product to get on the first page.
    • Almondsetat 29d ago
      For every kind of product one might need to buy?
  • robotresearcher 29d ago
    > Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Yes. I’d rather compete on quality and customer satisfaction than who can burn the most money on ads. By making it almost necessary to buy their ads, Amazon is harming my margin. I don’t hate all advertising, but I do hate this form, where it’s perverting search.
• skybrian 29d ago
  In the product search results game, I imagine Google and Amazon will soon have competition from AI chatbots linking to product pages in response to user queries. Also, OpenAI is getting into ad business. Seems like that will add a different place where book publishers could run ads? They will also need to optimize their web pages to be useful to bots looking for information.
• WarmWash 29d ago
  Really Amazon just has to overhaul their ratings system. That ads are fine, it's not difficult to see what is labeled "sponsored". What isn't fine is the hardcore gamification of reviews. If reviews are fixed and you want to pay to advertise your 2-star hand mixer? Sure, but you are probably just paying to show off that you suck.
  • IAmBroom 29d ago
    My favorite is when I leave a one/two star review, and the (always Chinese) merchant writes me, offering anywhere from $50 to a full refund if I change my review to 5 stars. I do. I like money. Amazon doesn't seem to care when I report them. And once the money clears my account, I change the review back. I have one on my desktop right now, awaiting a $50 gift card. I mean, I still care about people reading the reviews. They aren't completely immoral liars, like the company writing me.
• throwatdem12311 29d ago
  The only reason I have Prime these days is for the unlimited photo storage and then some extra storage for video. It’s hard to find a convenient and cost effective way to free my data.
• efavdb 29d ago
  Counterpoint: Amazon among the most favorable institutions in the US https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP_May2023_KeyResults.pdf https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP...
  • badgersnake 29d ago
    38% of people also think opposing fascism is very unfavourable according to that. Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.
    • rappatic 29d ago
      > Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public. You’re talking about Amazon’s actual customers here. Is Amazon supposed to ignore the opinion of their customers for the opinion of some commenter on HN?
• frereubu 29d ago
  I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. I hate the number of 10-packs of things I get where I only need one. (Luckily I live in a block of flats where there's a good community, so often I get those for free just by asking on our Signal group!)
  • graemep 29d ago
    A cheaper alternative is Argos for a lot of things.
    • ben_w 29d ago
      Argos, Poundland, Tesco, Lidl… Big surprise when I moved to Germany was that there's a Woolworth's brand here that survived independently to the one in the UK which closed decades ago.
  • gib444 29d ago
    > The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. So much nostalgia for these shops. A man with a posh, sparkling clean apron knowing exactly what you need or mean. In and out in under a minute or two having parted with just 30p Screwfix are actually pretty close in terms of service. Their staff are pretty patient with people and quite helpful. They mostly only sell packs of things though (and wow fixings got expensive... anyway. And it's ironic that the "trades" brand of the group that owns B&Q has better customer service than B&Q...)
    • inigyou 29d ago
      Spending 30p in a minute means the store's gross revenue including cost of goods sold is at most $18.00 per hour, which is already less than a living wage for one person.
• Aspos 29d ago
  I can recommend looking up Yanis Varoufakis and his Technofeudalism.
• einrealist 29d ago
  This is so true! I rarely order anything from Amazon these days, maybe once or twice a year. Everything feels like a rip-off or fake. I don't trust the search function at all. Nor do I trust the customer ratings. The only exception is if I buy from a brand I already know that has its own brand-shop, owned directly by the manufacturer.
• pbohun 29d ago
  An idea I've played around with in the past is to have some sort of law that limits how much revenue a company can make from ads. For example, a law that says "A company cannot make more than 10% of its gross revenue from ads or selling customer data". This kind of law would wreak havoc for certain companies (and content creators). However, just like prediction markets, ads distort and ruin the very thing they are trying to optimize.
• teiferer 29d ago
  > Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over. As much as I'd like to agree with the article's point and am critical of Amazon etc etc, you lost me here. $35k cash bonus for every employee does not pass the smell test. I'm sure the delivery driver who famously needs to pee into a bottle because they can't afford a toilet break would love such a bonus, but they don't get one. This makes me doubt everything in the article. Which is really a shame because such articles are necessary. But you need to keep your facts straight, otherwise you are completely disqualifying yourself from any serious discourse. At least for me. There is enough to criticise with Amazon. Just keep to the things that are true.
  • BeetleB 29d ago
    He's not saying they get the $35K bonus.
    • teiferer 29d ago
      Fair, but how easy is it to in that case mistakenly read it like that? It's not the only questionable figure in Seth's post. He also drops an ad for his new book within 2.5 short paragraphs. While criticising ad practices. He writes "if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place". Who is entitled to ...what exactly? Maybe you could argue the best air frier should get the top search result spot. Already calling that "entitled" is a stretch though, let alone being entitled to a sale. He writes "Who ends up paying the more than $50 billion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sellers. Sellers can’t make heartfelt donations for long. It’s you." It's economics 101 that such overhead, just like taxes, is ultimately split between buyer and seller. Profits go down and paid prices go up. Seth surely knows this (if not then he should not be blogging about economics) but chooses to give you the simplified version to push a narrative. Which is sad. Again, there is enough to legitimately criticise. I don't want to keep listing more of this, but it's really not feeling particularly honest discourse if you bend things while claiming a moral highground. Cause that makes you lose it. Unless your goal as an author is just to fuel outrage, no matter cost. Sure, an option, but not part of a serious debate then. Which, again, is a shame.
• insane_dreamer 29d ago
  cancelled our Prime membership a year ago (after nearly 10 years) and went from buying most non-food things on Amazon to occasionally buying small random items. We broke our addiction to 1 or 2-day shipping, and we're just fine.
• whall6 29d ago
  Is this not the direct result of consumers being too lazy to price match and price discover? Amazon still has the ability to sort price: low to high. You also still have the ability to ask your friends and family what air fryer they purchased. If the average consumer just implicitly trusts Amazon such that they buy whatever shows up first, that’s not Amazon’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault. I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.
  • deleted 29d ago
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• BeetleB 29d ago
  I'm having trouble understanding how this differs from traditional ads - even pre-Internet...? Didn't manufacturers pay to get premium shelf space in a store?
  • TheOtherHobbes 29d ago
    There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store. Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences. If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it. Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens. Only Amazon knows how many affiliate links lead to actual sales, how many ebook pages are actually read, what the CTR on ads really is, and so on.
    • BeetleB 29d ago
      > There's a difference between shelves in A Store and shelves in The Store. > Amazon can - and does - do whatever it wants with no consequences. 20+ years ago the exact same accusations were leveled against Walmart. I still don't see the difference. > If the algo has a bad day your trader account can be terminated. You'll have to battle through layers of time wasting bots to get anywhere near a human who can do something about it. Amazon is giving many people a platform they had no other hope of having. Years ago, for a while, I got deep into Amazon selling. An average Joe who is a full time employee can quickly set up a business, get some manufacturing contracts in China, and start selling on Amazon. In the old days, that Joe would never be allowed on Walmart's shelves.[1] So it's equally true with Walmart: That average Joe would not be able to get a human to help him, because the humans would exclude him to begin with. Amazon is giving the average Joe more opportunity than they ever had. We're merely criticizing them for not giving those kinds of sellers great service. Even for those who could get into Walmart - they made capricious decisions all the time that would impact your sales. If you were a small seller, you had no power over Walmart. > Amazon can decide to change your product pricing or offer special deals without asking you. You can opt out, but if you're in, you get no say in what happens. If the goal of your comment is to list all the reasons Amazon sucks - there's no need. I could write that list for you - I try not to buy from Amazon myself. The submission is specifically about their ads, as was my comment. [1] Arguably, that's a good thing, and Amazon's lack of curation is one of the reasons I don't shop at Amazon, but it is besides the point here.
• deleted 29d ago
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• throw5 29d ago
  Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either. There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like? But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail. The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.
  • conception 29d ago
    Also prevents food deserts and other dark societal patterns.
    • ApolloFortyNine 29d ago
      I have never once heard someone try and claim Amazon is why food deserts exist...
    • IAmBroom 29d ago
      Only a magically perfect network would do that. There's no force to "correct" food deserts. OTOH, Amazon grocery delivery in cities does do a LOT toward reducing their impact on poor people (who are not-poor enough to pay for Amazon delivery) (which might be cheaper than bus tickets). Hate on Amazon and Bezos all you want; some good comes out of it.
  • kfse 29d ago
• liendolucas 29d ago
  Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases. It's gone and confirmed and acknowledged by their support which made me take a screenshot of the popup where the card details are entered to confirm it. They in turned wanted to give me a 15€ gift card for the inconvenience and told them that I wasn't there asking for a gift card or discount and refused it. So every single time you purchase with your credit card if you do not want your details to be saved, you have to MANUALLY go to your personal settings and remove the added card from your last purchase. Fucking amazing. On top of that listings are overflowed with chinese brands and/or items that have no correlation to what I'm looking for. Can someone suggest better alternatives here in Europe?
• geodel 29d ago
  "Your margins are my opportunity" The great Bezos said ones and people, companies, stock market loved it. Now new CEO is noticing Amazon customers also have some margin and hence more opportunity for Amazon.
• imoldfella 29d ago
  Don't hate the player, hate the game. This is no different than grocery stores selling shelf space. It is not at all like theft (morally wrong) or taxes (infamously inefficient). And if you don't do it, you go out of business since you aren't competitive with someone that does. It's sad that such obvious rage bait makes it to the top of hacker news.
  • falcor84 29d ago
    What do you mean? I don't see how Amazon would go out of business if they show the best match for the thing you just searched for higher than the ads.
    • geodel 29d ago
      I mean of course. It is a mom n pop store with just 3 trillion market cap. If they don't do 95 ads with 5 actual results, they'll be out of business by this weekend.
  • geodel 29d ago
    Huh, retail store has fixed amount of shelf space, it can't keep infinite variants, but Amazon has infinite real estate it can keep the exact item you search for on page 23 instead of page 1. Have same item appear 10 times on different pages/places in search, retail store can't do that. It is like saying newspaper classified ads are same as Google ads. Not very good comparison.
• zetanor 29d ago
  The new (to me) Amazon Haul storefront is (to me) hilarious. I was stunned when I first saw it: https://www.amazon.com/haul/store https://www.amazon.com/haul/store I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Ships from third party" schemes, this feels like a new low. Paired with the article, it seems to me like the natural conclusion is that the company wants to move away from distribution and towards pure rent-seeking, in the most blatant ways possible, trying to squeeze as much cash as possible from their name while it has any value.
  • everybodyknows 29d ago
    > What does it mean that I'm the importer? Hello! Another thing it means is that you are legally responsible for paying ... ta-dum ... TARIFFS!
  • time0ut 29d ago
    Wow. Amazon Haul looks like the latest way to speed run heavy metal poisoning.
• GuB-42 29d ago
  It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work. Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality. As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenient, fast delivery, easy returns and all that. But if you forego that convenience, there is usually a cheaper option: local shops, Chinese platforms, direct sales, etc...
  • throwaway2037 29d ago
    > As for Amazon, it is not cheap! To be fair, I am not doubting this statement for your experience. However, I will say my experience is the opposite. Amazon, where I live, is regularly cheaper and/or more convenient (1/2 day shipping for nearly everything). This makes me ask the question: What is the "PPP" (purchasing power parity) of Amazon for each region? It seems logical that Amazon would be (in some regions): (1) cheap, or (2) nearly the same price, or (3) expensive. Of course, I am sure this also varies by product category.
    • rogerrogerr 28d ago
      > Amazon, where I live, is regularly cheaper and/or more convenient (1/2 day shipping for nearly everything). And where I live, which is not a first-tier dense city by any means, I regularly get 3 _hour_ shipping for common things. Often cheaper than I could get those items at walmart.
  • andrewla 29d ago
    It's confusing to me that amazon is in the ads business at all though. They're a retail service, not an ad business and it seems that all the ad business does is burn goodwill. They do have goodwill to burn, but it cheapens the entire experience.
    • jonahx 29d ago
      Per the article, in exchange for that goodwill they get a billion dollars per week. Do we need more explanation? To be clear, it's gross, but they are doing it just enough that their convenience and average sufficient product quality keeps me using them. I'd guess they do a lot of research to keep that balance where it is.
• sib 29d ago
  I'm sorry, but how does a business writer lead an article with garbage like this: Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue. Is it revenue or profit? They are not the same thing.
• carimura 29d ago
  My current strategy is to skip ads and skip any name that is just a jumble of letters. But the garbage producers are getting so good with AI they can create entire websites with US addresses and pictures of buildings and employees and none of it is real.
• mirmor23 29d ago
  lots of people here defending amazon blindly seem to be unaware of the full picture of how amazon ads works in the context of the marketplace. the point is that, if airfryer B is rival of A, and B buys ads (to let amazon show B ahead of A even if they searched for A), and A doesn't buy ads, then if B resorts to marketing to lower the quality just enough to compete, then all the quality focus of A will not end up increasing their sales. more importantly, to have a good view on which products are good which one are the best is not available inside of amazon that easily. reusing sku, tricking people into buying inferior ones does not impact amazon in any way since return costs are paid by the fba vendor, or seller.
  • SpicyLemonZest 29d ago
    I'm sure that's very annoying for A Inc. It's probably more annoying than the slotting fee they paid Target, or the wholesale discount Walmart demanded, because "we only have room on the shelf for 3 brands" feels like more of a real constraint than "only 3 brands can be the top 3 search results". Is it worse for me as a consumer? I'm not convinced.
• brunoborges 29d ago
  "If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse." This is it.
• apparent 29d ago
  Imagine there's a best-selling toaster. Amazon can recommend it and many people will be happy buying it. Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm? To send a strong enough signal, it would probably need a level of sales that could only be achieved with some level of advertising. Separately, I'd note that Amazon doesn't want high levels of returns (which it has to pay for in many cases), so they still try to herd people toward products that they will find acceptable. Might they not love them as much as some others? Perhaps, though this is a fine line to try to walk, and I'm not sure that Amazon is actually trying to walk it.
  • Arainach 29d ago
    > Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm? This is a solved problem. Recommendation algorithms aren't just "highest average rating", they take into account number of ratings, recent trends, etc. Even if some ads improve this experience, Amazon is orders of magnitude past that threshold into hostility and toxicity. You have to scroll through pages of sponsored results to find anything worthwhile.
  • AuthAuth 29d ago
    Same way youtube gets people to view new videos. By showing a few people the video and if they like it then show it to more people. Obviously for something as expensive as a product launch you'd weight it a bit more towards the new product than a youtube video but still.
  • fsh 28d ago
    Shops used to curate their catalogs by in-house testing products from various suppliers. If a supplier comes up with a better toaster, they can send samples to the most relevant shops and convince them to stock it.
• joshstrange 29d ago
  Amazon search has been terrible for as long as I can remember. Not to disregard the scourge of ads that has infested the results but I've been frustrated with Amazon search for almost 2 decades. Oh sure, their search gives you the impression you can filter/sort but due to zero policing anyone can say whatever they want about their product and I have the feeling Amazon just sucks at this on top of the seller malice. Just try to filter down to the dimensions you need, the connector you are looking for, the material you'd prefer and you'll be inundated with tons of items that share not resemblance to the filters you entered. I only want X brand, here I hope you want to see results from Z, W, Q brands as well! I only want items under 2ft wide, here are 4ft, 1ft, 6ft options! I want only <1' cables, here are 12ft cables. It's all a miserable experience. Often I skip the filters because if they are so bad at keeping out the trash then I worry I'll also lose legit options because I have zero trust in Amazon's ability to accurately filter. I won't pretend running Amazon is easy but I'm constantly in shock at how absolutely terrible Amazon's website is to use. The number of UIs that are clearly optimized around data retrieval optimization instead of serving the customer is insane.
  • FishFry62 24d ago
    I grew frustrated searching on Amazon as well. So much so that it inspired me to build a chrome extension as a little shopping assistant. It can't do it all but it does help filter out some of the noise like spammy seller names, sponsored results, low reviews, etc. You might find it useful! https://shopsmart-ai.com https://shopsmart-ai.com
• itskarad 29d ago
  The article mentions that the "best" airfyer seller also has to place bids on their names / keywords, but I don't think there's a best, just like there's no best shoes. There are so many niches that exist in products — does it fit in a tight space, what's the shape, what's the air-frying technique, do the buttons work with oven mitts — so there are different bestsellers in each subcategory.
• aeturnum 29d ago
  Amazon is a net-negative overall but I don't think this understanding is correct: > The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. This is only true in extremely simply scenarios. In reality, most of the time individual consumers may prefer something other than "the highest ranked item in this category." Maybe another company has a feature that increases cost but adds utility, maybe there's a brand you trust more that makes a slightly less popular version, etc. The problems of parasitic advertising still exist. People still see ads for products they will like less than the top rated search, but it's wrong to imagine that Amazon actually knows what that person would like best. If matching people to products was that easy you'd have all kinds of 3rd party recommendation services making very specific recommendations to make money off affiliate links. Instead we have a million "top 10" sites that work about as well as picking the #1 seller in an amazon category: not that well.
  • its_ethan 29d ago
    You raise a very good counter to what feels like the main thrust of the guys article. It put to words something that felt "off" to me while reading it, that there was an assumption made that was never stated and was also incorrect - so thanks for putting that to words. He seems to assume that there is 1 air fryer that everyone on Earth should be getting, and all others are strictly inferior. There are probably no products that exists where that logic is true. There is so much variation in cost vs quality, or entire feature-sets like you pointed out. This bleeds over into incredibly "messy" areas too, like societal signaling. Someone might specifically want a more expensive version of something simply because it's more expensive. The author doesn't seem to account for any of this complexity, even the "simple" complexity of cost/quality/features. The value that these types of ads can add is that Amazon can build up models that can "learn" and get better at matching every unique persons criteria and provide a way for vendors to get "matched" with that buyer. Obviously you can still critique this model, but to assume it's strictly bad feels like it lacks nuance/critical thinking.
    • aeturnum 29d ago
• itskarad 29d ago
  One could argue that Google Ads are jacking up the prices of hotels. To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.
• ApolloFortyNine 29d ago
  Grocery stores and department stores have played games with what items they stock and where they stock it (location on the shelf is hugely important in a grocery store) for decades, it's just better hidden than the 'sponsored' text next to Amazon paid ads. It's infinitely easier to make a product and get it available on Amazon.com than it ever was to get your product into a grocery store. >They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one As others have pointed out, without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.
  • gizmo686 29d ago
    > without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that. If you are Amazon, this is essentially just the multi-armed bandit problem, at it is not particularly difficult. You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it.
    • ApolloFortyNine 29d ago
      >You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it. You just handwaved away the hardest problem. What is 'enough'? What if the first user failed to plug it in and left a 1/5? Or liked it but left a 3/5 anyways? And what if you show it too many people so now rebranding products and just dropshipping them takes off?
• alexfromapex 29d ago
  At least they are labeled as “Sponsored”. There’s probably a browser extension to remove them.
• mbesto 29d ago
  Isn't it funny that marketers are usually the first people to complain about paying for marketing? FWIW - I agree with the premise of the article, but I have to say - the reason these types of practices are acceptable in American culture is exactly because of prominent "marketing gurus".
• amluto 29d ago
  > The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“ I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this: 1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an ad for a competitor at higher priority than the actual result. 2. Fraud. If I search for a product that Amazon sells and Amazon shows me an ad for a different product first and hides the product I searched for below the fold, they are effectively telling me that they don’t have the product I searched for and possibly that it doesn’t exist. It seems to me that this is deceiving me for commercial gain. 3. Fraud again. If I search for a specific book and Amazon shows me an ad for that book, I think they’re trying to trick me into clicking that ad so they get extra revenue even if I don’t intend to click an ad. (And they’ve defrauded the ad buyer too. Those clicks are bogus. Seth Godin should not be charged for a click when the clicker was searching for the book by a good approximation of its name!) Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions :)
  • ryandvm 29d ago
    Burnt myself on this in Google Maps just this week. I had an appointment in my calendar with the location set to "Dr Firstname Lastname, 123 Main St, 12345". I clicked through it into Google Maps and since it had the full address specified I just trusted it. Well, it turned out that the first result was actually an ad for a competing doctor 20 minutes in the wrong direction. To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...
    • qwerpy 29d ago
      This is egregious. I would be livid if I drove 20 minutes to an ad buyer's location instead of the actual address, after putting in the actual address to google maps. This is completely the opposite of what a map should be doing for you. If you can, use Apple maps for now, although Apple has proudly proclaimed that they will be serving ads in maps soon. I also refuse to use the maps.app.goo.gl short links that google maps always wants to send. They will trap you in the compromised google search ecosystem. Insist on using raw addresses. I will paste in the raw address every time someone in a group chat sends a goo.gl link.
• chanux 29d ago
  The market will fix this right? RIGHT?
• rich_sasha 29d ago
  This seems generally like the US corporate playbook. Create a product, monopolize it and milk the monopoly. SpaceX, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, Facebook, Google…
• senderista 29d ago
  I think AWS still cares about customer trust, but Amazon retail abandoned that at least a decade ago. The ads are so high-margin compared to retail though (biggest profit center after AWS) that I don't expect them to change anything.
• arjie 29d ago
  Haha, that's the classic thing with platforms that have demand aggregation. They extract a lot of stuff. DTC, Telehealth, all these things end up paying Meta and Google a large fraction of their revenue. Same with Stripe et al. The idea is to take a rake on all spending. It puts you in an unfathomably strong position. It's why Visa and Mastercard are such good businesses. To get something in front of someone you need to do some work. These guys have the people so they charge you to show it to them. I'm realistically not going off Amazon. If you want to list the ebook on your website maybe I'll buy it there, but if you do a physical copy your 'tax' is going to Shopify. That's how it is.
• dainiusse 29d ago
  Imo it's all about all ads. And then it is about all middlemen.even real estate agents make ir more expensive for both - seller and buyer
• delegate 29d ago
  This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy. Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video .. There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it.. We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.
  • qurren 29d ago
    Related: I've seen several local restaurants offering extremely good food come up and die simply because they could never get attention. People only look at recommendations now, they don't look with their eyes anymore. So now restaurants have to focus on growth hacking rather than food quality.
    • evereverever 29d ago
      I've seen a lot of "Thai Food Near Me" as the name of restaurants.
      • inigyou 29d ago
        What do you think would happen if they were called Current Location?
        • lesostep 28d ago
          Slightly off topic, but that would be a great name for a curry restaurant
• hamza_ali_shah 29d ago
  But this is how ads work? The entire concept of programtic ads is based on bidding for the highest leverage time and placement with $$.. So even you have the best product and your competitor outbids you, they get seen more and most likely get bought more? And even if you go into a normal retail shop with a product in mind, all the available options showcased can "distort" your actual intent. Because that's what the shop is designed to do: to showcase, and even in that showcase, some products are placed/showcased so they catch your attention. I doubt anyone chooses to create shoddy products just so they have more money to market them..
• emacdona 29d ago
  > The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for. "If you're not the customer, you're the product". Well, Amazon actually did it. They made us the customer _AND_ the product. Hooray. Like LOTS of other people, I, of course, use Amazon. But, more and more often... if I can find a product somewhere else within, say, 5-6%... I'll buy it that someplace else. Especially if that someplace else is actually a building I can walk into and inspect the thing I'm buying before I pay for it. Shopping on Amazon is getting worse every day. How can it be good for Amazon in the long run that every time I buy something from their site, I actually have to spend time convincing myself that I'm not getting a knock-off product? In the modern world, every single time money leaves my bank account I feel like I'm potentially being scammed. I hate it.
• orsenthil 29d ago
  > Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over. Theoretically. Amazon doesn't give a shit about well being or enrichment of it's employees. Every single one of the them. They tried to squeeze the productivity and since the Stock has been doing well, many employees have made a reasonable money. But forget the well being or profit sharing aspects with the employees.
• giamma 29d ago
  I live in Italy, Amazon opened its Italian branch about 15 years ago. Initially it had a smaller catalog of products, with products sold almost entirely by Amazon. They were delivering packages in 3 days and the price was almost always much better than any other online or physical shop. Over the years they largely improved the delivery time. Now if I am ordering a package before 4PM there is a high chance I will get it the next day in the morning. Prices however became higher and higher, at the point that for many products Amazon is not that convenient anymore: if you need home appliance (TV, dishwasher etc) other online or physical shops are now significantly cheaper. If you look sport equipment (e.g. climbing, mountain bike, hiking) the specialized shops are usually cheaper as long as you are OK to wait for longer delivery time and maybe combine 2 or more products to reduce the shipping costs. I still find Amazon convenient during prime days and black Friday, and because of the large catalog with many alternatives and sometimes useful reviews (need a new shower head, a new mouse, a hole puncher, a tire for the bicycle...) but prices are not as good as they used to be. But if you need something in a hurry, the fact that you can order today and get it tomorrow is a big plus.
• ilaksh 29d ago
  The solution could be common evolving public protocols to create large alternative non-profit marketplaces.
  • IAmBroom 29d ago
    > non-profit marketplaces So, um, Marxist utopias? Profit is exactly why all marketplaces exist.
    • ilaksh 28d ago
      There are ways to collect necessary operational fees without needing to turn a profit, and it's also to operate a digital marketplace on the communities own collect infrastructure, so that might not even be necessary. Amazon exists as a big monopoly marketplace because they started collecting a large number of goods they were selling for profit and then leveraged that momentum and near monopoly into controlling the whole market. But it started out as just a retailer. For digital goods, we can create digital marketplaces that aren't controlled by one of the retailers in that market.
• forinti 29d ago
  As awful as Amazon has become, I still use it for the same reason I started using it many years ago: books. It's the one place I can find all the books my kids need for school. You search with an ISBN and always find exactly what you want. Other things I buy elsewhere.
• maerF0x0 29d ago
  > They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model That's assuming two things -- user desires and valuation models are identical (they're not, even within a single product view) and that the state of products is static -- Once a product is best there cannot be a new best in the future. You have to have buyers try new products, some of them disappointed, to plot the shape of what is best or worst. Charging companies a fee means they have to be really sure/serious that what they have to offer is market satisfying (else they're wasting their money). What we really need is for consumers to stop being so short term thinking and buying the cheapest item (on BNPL no less) and for Amazon to be held accountable for how they penalize people who legitimately compete with them (imo an anti-trust issue). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxl_lO15Ocg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxl_lO15Ocg - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5otF7Bj5LxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5otF7Bj5LxI
• ViktorRay 29d ago
  Worth mentioning that Google has the same tax in Google Maps. It is bad for the same reasons that the Amazon Tax mentioned in the post is bad… Many times I search for a restaurant like McDonalds and the top result won’t be the one nearest to me…it will be a sponsored result for one that is farther away from me. Pretty wild that Google does this. It’s bad for people. It’s bad because instead of picking the best choice to be the top, Google is showing a worser choice for money. The same reason why this blog mentions that the Amazon Tax is bad.
• binarysolo 29d ago
  Long time Amazon seller/brand here (and ex-academic/game theorist) -- it's a little more complicated if you think about the various parties' incentives, but yeah we have a half-assed market equilibrium that sucks for everyone. Amazon as the marketplace facilitator has an interesting job to run: 1) It wants customers to get exactly what they want (as measured by the minimal amount of clicking/scrolling/time it takes for a customer to hit the landing page -> complete shopping). This is mostly customer-centric. 2) It wants to promote as much competition as it can between products and brands so that no seller dominates the market. This is... mildly customer-centric so big sellers can't rest on their laurels, and mostly self-serving (so no single seller/brand can gain enough power to threaten Amazon). 3) Amazon has to strike a balance of #1 and #2 so that there's some opportunity for new entrants to enter any product space. Back in the days they structured search so that some percentage of results would be new sellers and products, and new products would get some amount of sessions to prove they convert within a certain statistical distribution to land a certain rank (BSR). Note the rise of alphabet soup Amazon brands is partially because they allowed for disposable brands that could be black-hatted, and partially because for a few years these sellers were just generating tons of new brands to share new SKU real estate on search results (so when you searched for "small kitchen colander" or what not, you'd find the same product being sold by 10 sockpuppet sellers occupying 10 search spaces, taking result space away from the other sellers). But what if they can get everyone to partially pay for #3? Enter ads, where basically new and old brands pay to play for eyeballs on Amazon. So if you think about it, Amazon is a search problem where you wanna push results such that the expected value of the results pushed yield the highest expected value, something along the lines of: Expected Value (EV) of your product = [your sales price] x [your product's conversion rate in the past X days] x [some confidence level of said conversion rate] - [returns] + [whatever other Amz secret sauce] + [Amazon PPC] Amazon can get people to pay for their eyeballs, swap some seller blackhat tactics for others, and more or less keep OK results. So that's Amazon's end. As an established seller -- I know my product converts at X%, so as long as the math works out where I spend $Y/click, expect it to convert at X%, and my profit Z > Y * X it's what I do (and the tax I pay), and I move that up and down depending on my inventory situation. If possible, yes, I would pass some of that down to price raises as long as the market's willing to bear it, so I can make a minimum margin requirement off my Amazon channel (which is the lowest, compared to my D2C website or through offline B&M channels, but I do so because my biggest volume is on-Amazon). As a customer... yeah the default search results are "good enough" for the 80-20 crowd; the convenience, ease-to-checkout, and 1-2 day shipping wins them over. As a "nerdy" customer who likes researching products to get the best one, I used to research via online reviews and reddit (most of which are gamified in their own ways)... but now I use AI (ChatGPT, *not* Amazon's Alexa Shopping because it's not great) and mostly call it a day.
• Taikhoom10 29d ago
  [flagged]
  • oblio 29d ago
    Do yourself a favor and get a real domain name if you're going to promote it :-)
• jeromechoo 29d ago
  Last week I searched for a "Eufy S350" security camera on Amazon. Instead of search results, Alexa for Shopping took over the entire screen, proceeded to tell me that the Eufy S350 doesn't exist, and then recommended a Eufy vacuum cleaner. This feels comical to me today, but I can imagine a near future where paid AI ads gaslit you into believing that the product you searched for is vastly inferior to the product AI "recommends".
• StilesCrisis 29d ago
  I've tried to replace Amazon with other vendors where possible. You can get partway there, but half the time, my orders get delivered from an Amazon warehouse anyway. Smaller vendors have basically surrendered logistics to Amazon entirely. At least I'm not giving Amazon ad revenue if I don't order directly through them!
• Fordec 29d ago
  I'm honestly at the stage where I'm finding the same product but cheaper in the local retailer. I don't mean a dollar here or there, I mean a full 30% cheaper. Particularly most things food related. I used to be putting in an order weekly, I now haven't in almost three months.
• Altaba 29d ago
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• Netherlands007 29d ago
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• CrzyLngPwd 29d ago
  I can't comment on the economics of it but amazon search is awful, and I think it's by design, not just by design though. I was recently searching for some draw runners of a certain fixed size. Just cheap ones for some drawers I'm making for a workbench. Found some cheap ones but not the correct length, but it made me realise something; If I sorted by price low to high the cheap ones did not show on any of the results pages. Amazon was purposefully showing me more expensive products. I took some info from the cheap ones, searched for that, and the ones I wanted showed up in the search. I wonder if anyone has trawled all of Amazon, and made a better search tool that doesn't try to rip anyone off? Anyway, I am starting to find products cheaper outside of Amazon, including p&p.
  • FishFry62 22d ago
    I built ShopSmart-AI. It's not a "better search tool" but it is a Chrome extension that adds some sudo-filtering to Amazon results. Like the ability to filter out sponsored products, spammy seller names, and products with low review counts. It also has some other AI features you may find handy if you want to check it out. https://shopsmart-ai.com https://shopsmart-ai.com
• Taikhoom10 29d ago
  [flagged]
• latentframe 29d ago
  It looks less like an advertising but more like a rent extraction with a casi toll on commerce that ultimately gets passed on to consumers
• senordevnyc 29d ago
  Is this different than the decades-only practice of grocery stores auctioning off all the eye-level shelf space to brands willing to pay for it?
• luke5441 29d ago
  For a while Amazon was good at discovering new books to read. Nowadays my ad-blocker blocks everything except for the book I am directly navigating to from the page. No discovery of new books is happening for me there anymore. Another place to discover new books was Goodreads. Bought and left to rot by Amazon. I don't buy many books anymore.
  • thaumasiotes 29d ago
    You could... change your adblocker? I use uBlock Origin, which doesn't block "customers also bought" widgets at all.
• arlattimore 29d ago
  Similarly, this is also why Google stopped enforcing trademarks years ago. It allows more people to bid on terms, increases competition, increases CPCs & of course pads their bottom line.
• penguin_booze 29d ago
  The income tax in UK has this quirk: once you fall near the top tax bracket, you retrospectively lose all tax-free allowances you could have availed, had you not fallen in the top tax bracket. Likewise, once corporations blow past a revenue cap, they shouldn't be eligible for lower rate of corporate tax. If the US is any cautionary tale (it always is), it's a moral imperative not to let corporations get too big. Letting corporations grow big and still avail tax cuts, is like feeding your own cancer.
  • skeeter2020 29d ago
    it's very attractive to try and build a progressive tax system that swings too far the other way too. Economically some sort of tax free base and a flat rate is the best but politically it's way better to attack here and carve out these exemptions... the biggest winner is tax prep software.
  • etothepii 29d ago
    In reality though it isn't implemented as you described. In reality it is merely that there is a 62% marginal rate from 100k to 100k + 2x the personal allowance. They do this with sole traders who face a £14k (~$20k) slab tax bill (VAT) if they go from £85k to £85,001 (~$100k). The outcome has been near total depletion of skill tradesman "mate" apprenticeships. Since such people (not being totally stupid) take 3 months off per year or work 4 days per week and turn down jobs.
• timnetworks 29d ago
  The real amazon tax is getting people to think shipping fees are part of the item, and causing one $5 cable+shipping to be $10. Three $5 cables and shipping is $30. tbh if amazon went up in smoke like wildberries I would not even flinch.
• gregsadetsky 29d ago
  Only very tangentially related of course, but for all of that money going into search/ads/targeting, etc., searching 'shirt without stripes' on amazon today still returns shirts with stripes. Per the classic https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes
• etchalon 29d ago
  If you know the exact product you want, Amazon is great. If you don't, it's absolutely horrible.
• Chinjut 29d ago
  Regulation, antitrust, regulation, antitrust.
  • method_capital 29d ago
    A) More laws to solve more problems the government has never been able to solve. OR B) Don't use Amazon LOL
    • IAmBroom 29d ago
      A) The old "laws don't work perfectly so we're better off without any laws" argument.
• metalsiliconYT 29d ago
  Insinuating that there is one "best product" that Amazon magically knows is the best is quite an assumption. The best product might be completely different for different people and different depending on the time for the same person. Plus there are always new products being introduced and products being discontinued. I think we are mis assuming ill intent a little. Second issue is the assumption that there is always a fixed pie of demand for a product, when a new great product comes out more people will purchase from a category, its never fixed completely. This sounds like cope for book sales being lower than expected if we are being honest.
• PowerElectronix 29d ago
  Enshittification for everyone that comes into contact with a corporation run with only profit (and profit growth) in mind. One would be tempted to think that doing things different and actually providing a good service for consumers, sellers, etc would be a multibillion dollar business, but somehow it seems like it isn't.
• keeda 29d ago
  Same reason why the top ad on Google when you search for a brand is for the brand itself -- "brand bidding" is a thing, and if you don't bid on ads for your own brand, a competitor will. If Google can do it why not Amazon! I do not understand why sellers accept this practice. I'd assume it would run afoul of some trademark law but the distinct lack of lawsuits indicates that either the legal grounds are shaky... or the sellers themselves find some advantage in it.
• tiffanyh 29d ago
  I respect Seth quite a bit and have been an avid reader for two decades, but this post struck me as odd. It reads as though he’s just discovering how the digital advertising industry works (and he's a marketer) ... not just Amazon, but also Google etc.
  • WA 29d ago
    And Apple. Unsurprisingly, the brand name of my app converts best, except Apple wants an outrageous $3 per click or something. Of course, I simply live with no ads and trust in people finding the correct download link if they want my app and not the competitor bidding for my brand keyword.
• arthurjj 29d ago
  I'm sympathetic to the points he makes. But it's hard to take it seriously when he makes his money selling marketing and he's complaining about cpc advertising. It's like if a horse breeder were complaining about cars
• AvAn12 29d ago
  Bravo!
• noir_lord 29d ago
  Not using Amazon (in light of geopolitical events and quite frankly, just not liking the way they do business or Jeff Bezos (as he presents himself to the world)) has been a net positive. There was a time it was good and convenient and the worst of what they are wasn't quite so obvious but that time has passed.
• happyopossum 29d ago
  This is the virtual equivalent of manufacturers paying for premium floor/shelf space in a brick and mortar store. The way to avoid it is to ignore the sponsored results and do some actual browsing - just like comparison shopping in a physical store.
• AvAn12 29d ago
  Closed amazon account when Bz decided to get into politics. I realize I can buy everything I need “in the real world” and thru manufacture websites directly. I do not miss it.
• otterley 29d ago
  I don't understand the "theft" or "stealing" angle here, other than as a clumsy rhetorical device. I can see an "unfair" angle, and the behavior is definitely bad for customers, but it's not theft. Theft and stealing are when someone unlawfully[1] takes something that belongs to you. But here, it's never established that whatever was taken ever belonged to either the consumer or the maker in the first place. [1] The author tries to escape this requirement by calling it "legal theft" but that's an oxymoron.
• tadzikpk 29d ago
  This reminds me of SABRE preferring American Airlines flights see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_system)#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_syst.... Back in 1984 this "Preferential display" was considered illegal by the US government. How times have changed.... In Europe, it led to the creation of the competing Amadeus system which did not keep display preferences and now dominates the market.
• adamsmark 29d ago
  Sort by "Best Sellers" always on Amazon. "Featured" is driven by ads. Also? Firefox with Ublock Origin blocks ads (but it's an endless cat and mouse game).
• Tepix 29d ago
  Amazon has many decisive conflicts of interest: - improving search results vs less ad revenue - promoting their own products vs merchants' - streamlining the shopping vs trying to sell more stuff As long as these fundamental conflicts aren't resolved, it's not going to improve.
• yndoendo 29d ago
  You have to pay me to engage with Amazon. They have become so big that they harm the buying power of the consumer and the selling power of the producer. I know this first hand. Company had to give away 1-2 million in free engineering labor for the opportunity to obtain their business. Have not bought anything from them in over 10 years and never will again.
• deleted 29d ago
  [deleted]
• marginalx 29d ago
  This is by far the most annoying thing about Amazon to me. They clearly are doing a disservice to their consumer with this. Many times I go straight to google to search for Amazon products, which leads to better results
• delfugal 29d ago
  Amazon is nearly worthless to find anything anymore. Same items repeated dozens to hundreds of times, with minor changes, but all pointing to the same item. It's like GOogle when ads outweighed your search results. Amazon has become a garbage pit.
• citizenpaul 29d ago
  The amazon tax holds nothing to the credit card tax. Credit cards have been driving prices up for decades with their behind the scenes fees that are passed onto the customer. All for "convenience" of the right to buy something because now they have created a near mandatory purchasing system duopoly.
• jimkleiber 29d ago
  I'm curious how similar/different this is to buying shelf space or aisle placement in physical stores.
• weatherlite 29d ago
  I like the stock
• dreamcompiler 29d ago
  It's gotten ridiculous in the last month with behavior I've never seen before. If I want to buy a specific book I type <author name> <title> into the search bar. The search bar even helps me complete the entry, and then a page shows with a choice of several books with my chosen book at the top. Fine. Except now after one second, the whole page changes and then there's only one book on the page and it has nothing to do with the book I actually searched for. So obviously they know about the book I want because they just showed it to me but then they make it disappear in favor of one I don't want but which I presume is one the publisher paid them to show me. My workaround is to search on Amazon in a private tab so they don't know who I am. In that case the book I want shows up and I can click on it and get its URL and then paste it into the original Amazon window where I'm already logged in, and I can order it. Except I don't, because I'm so disgusted by this I go directly to the publisher's website and order it there. This is ridiculous. Amazon is throwing money on the floor with this behavior and they're probably just begging for a restraint of trade class-action lawsuit.
• autoexec 29d ago
  > Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over. There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and housing assistance, but I'd be willing to bet that amazon would make back some of it in increased amazon purchases too. It'd be great if the government cracked down on corporations who use taxpayer money to subsidize their labor expenses
  • apercu 29d ago
    Socialize the costs and privatize the profits is where all this regulatory capture has gotten us.
  • kamarg 29d ago
    I've long felt that there needs to be a bill passed to charge companies $x additional tax each year where $x is the amount of government assistance their employees required in order to meet food/housing minimum standards. One way or the other, the companies that are making the rest of us pay for their employees to survive need to be funding these programs.
    • hahahaa 29d ago
      Or just increase minimum wage. 3x maybe? Same thing, and simpler to do than making new law. I always prefer keeping tax simple!
    • inigyou 29d ago
      Isn't it actually the government's fault for setting minimum wage below food stamp wage?
      • danny_codes 26d ago
        And who is lobbying the government to keep it that way? Probably Amazon let's be real here
• HPsquared 29d ago
  Amazon is more powerful than most countries.
  • thaumasiotes 29d ago
    This is generally true throughout history: powerful actors in strong countries are stronger than the most powerful actors in weak ones.
• theologic 29d ago
  [flagged]
• Brendinooo 29d ago
  >If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of its quality? How would I break through, if not ads?
  • dlandis 29d ago
    There's also the fact that Amazon really doesn't know the best-reviewed item anyway, at least in any meaningful sense, since most reviews (including verified) are fake/inorganic.
    • Brendinooo 29d ago
      Right. If the only metric was "best-reviewed" then more people would be faking reviews. To be clear I'm not letting Amazon entirely off the hook here, but Seth's situation is somewhat unique in that "someone looking for a particular book" seems to me like a really different use case than "I want an air fryer". And "Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive" falls a little flat when a main reason for shopping on Amazon is that their prices tend to be really good.
  • superxpro12 29d ago
    The point of this article is that, if Amazon doesnt want you do, then you wont.
  • boznz 29d ago
    > How would I break through, if not ads? You wouldn't, your product would languish in obscurity and unless the searcher knew the exact actual product name forever be on page 200 of the search results (As a Sci-Fi book author I found this out the hard way). Influencers and having followers can also help your product break through, but that's about it. Self promotion of your product is usually actively discouraged or banned by many forums.
• hahahaa 29d ago
  This is simply, a monopoly. Whatever mechanism they came up with to squeeze the final dollars out of the system, such a system would exist because they can.
• raincole 29d ago
  > If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one At least ads give the sellers a chance to compete for eyeballs 'legitimately'. The same marketing budget will not just vaporize if there is no ad space. It will be spent on fake reviews and even fake customers. People who hate ads don't realize buying ads is the least evil way to compete for customers' attention.
• einpoklum 29d ago
  Large enough companies always set up rent mechanisms. > Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve. The stealing is, of course, much more fundamental than the search tax. I am reminded of the saying by 19th-century French social thinker Proudhon, who said: "La propriete? C'est le vol!" ("Property? Why, that's theft!") - he was describing interactions which, at that time, it was conceivably possible to manage collectively for the public benefit - taken over by individuals, institutions and mechanisms economically benefits a small few to the detriment of the majority (farmers and laborers). The Amazon product search example is different, but then, also not so different. I mean, it's just search - and the blog post author knows it could just be implemented reasonably so that people who want to find his book find his book. Then suddenly, Amazon put a fence around that field and demands you pay a part of your annual yield for it to allow you to farm that field, and not drive you off by force. And that metaphor is probably quite clear to you even though there are no farmers, fields or fences in the blog post. Amazon's not stealing that money from its stockholders, which is who
• anarticle 29d ago
  Turns out we ended up with paid search, but paid for by who? :D Seems bad.
• goodrubyist 29d ago
  This assumes that people only (or at least) mostly depend on Amazon's search results' ordering to decide which products to buy. This is not true, at least not for everyone. I, e.g., visit review websites like Wirecutter to decide. Something tells me I'm not the only one.
• asah 29d ago
  Google has entered the chat, and also eBay and every aggregator site on the web.
• thaumasiotes 29d ago
  > When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options. Sure, this is probably accurate in many situations. > The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far [for Seth Godin's new book, The Knot] is the search "Seth Godin The Knot". But not that one. If you cut spending on that ad to zero, you would lose an immeasurably small number of sales. The ad is high yield because people who search for "Seth Godin The Knot" are already planning to buy Seth Godin's The Knot. Letting other people display ads on top of that search won't dissuade them.
• SA9G 29d ago
  Lower and lower S/N on the internet.... and businesses adding to the N so they can charge for the S. If enough become aware of this, they will vote with their $$ and Amazon (et al) will lose market share. But sadly the TicToc generation doesn't seem to notice :-()
• gtirloni 29d ago
  > This study argues that an ecommerce site with search ads actually sells fewer items than the same site without ads. Shouldn't the very same marketing companies buying these ads know this? Why are they misleading their clients?
• jitbit 29d ago
  > paying Amazon a dollar to show you an ad for the book you searched in the first place. This is the worst part. Google Ads are the same. I pay about $2 per click for my EXACT PRODUCT NAME search, otherwise 6 other competitor ads are shown on top of google search before the actual results
• YesThatTom2 29d ago
  Maybe instead of being an author your should have had the foresight to be Jeff Bezos.
• metabagel 29d ago
  That's one tax. The other tax is that companies raise their prices elsewhere so that they aren't lower than the list price on Amazon, because that would violate Amazon's policy.
• xyzelement 29d ago
  I don't love (but use...) Amazon but I think if done properly, ads can be relevant even when searching for a specific thing. Let's use a Google Example: I search for Toyota RAV4 and get an ad for Mazda cx-50. Obviously Toyota hates that but as a consumer it has a chance of making me aware of something I didn't know but would want to know, especially as a part of a purchase decision. That's why Mazda pays for that ad slot, and also why Toyota makes it expensive for them :) Obviously google in this scenario comes out ahead and it is annoying for some users but can be highly valuable if done well. It's not how I search or shop but plenty of people do.
  • ryukoposting 29d ago
    No. If I search "Toyota RAV4" what I mean is Toyota RAV4. If I meant Mazda CX-50 I would have typed "Mazda CX-50." If I wanted information about various mid-size SUVs, rather than one in particular, I'd have searched "midsize SUVs." The number of times I have searched something, got back something I did not ask for, and found that helpful, rounds down to zero. It's actively destructive to the platforms that allow this kind of hijacking of search terms.
    • ScoobleDoodle 29d ago
      Agreed. Also a search along the lines “cars like Toyota RAV4" when I intend to broaden the search to other equivalents, because I don’t know the terminology.
    • enquirewithin 29d ago
      [flagged]
      • wolfd 29d ago
        I think that it’s fine, and good, to critique the way that corporations do their business. That’s kinda one of the core tenets of capitalism, no?
    • rexer 29d ago
      Are you saying that because it’s across company boundaries? Or would you be similarly upset if one result was for a Toyota Highlander? Or for a Toyota RAV4 XSE but not the LE trim I gotta say, I think you’re in the minority. I suspect most folks appreciate the cross shopping suggestion
• stack_framer 29d ago
  "...the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place." No company is "entitled" to any sales.
  • stingraycharles 29d ago
    The point is that, because of their product’s merits, they would organically be the top ranked search result. But due to advertising, they have lost that spot and now either must give up sales or also advertise.
    • stack_framer 29d ago
      I understand the point. I simply argue that it's an ill-conceived point, based on various definitions of the word "entitled": 1. qualified for by right according to law 2. having a right to certain benefits or privileges 3. having a right or legitimate claim to something No company is qualified for sales according to law, or has a right to sales, or has a legitimate claim on sales. Sales must be earned by besting the competition. No company is "entitled" to any sales.
• nonfamous 29d ago
  I moved from the US to Australia recently, and Amazon isn’t really a thing here. Yes, it exists, and it is heavily marketed, but the range available in the store is at a guess less than 1% of what’s available in the US store. I occasionally go to amazon.com.au to look for things, have the same issue having to wade through irrelevant slop in the search results, find nothing suitable, and leave. And then I do what it seems most Australians still do — go to a mall, or visit a specialty retailer, or use a specialty retailer’s clunky website and find exactly the thing I need and order it there and get it a few days later. It’s quite refreshing to go out on the shopping streets or to the malls, and see many people out and about shopping. Likewise, the staff in stores are well-informed and helpful, and make the shopping experience pleasant and efficient. Amazon is why we can’t have nice shopping experiences in the US.
• FinnKuhn 29d ago
  If you are living in Germany I can not recommend https://geizhals.de/ https://geizhals.de/ enough. It is "just" a price comparision website, but it features most relevant online stores for me, annd more importantly their filters are just amazing and allow you to find products extremly efficient.
• scotty79 29d ago
  Ads are tax on the market, that costs everyone and wastes most of it. Ad industry is an example that markets don't correctly solve everything.
• ggm 29d ago
  Not identical problem, but similar. If I have just read "Dombey & Son" and want to read more Dickens, I search "Dickens" and get Monica Dickens? ok, more fool me. But if I search "Charles Dickens" and get "in the style of charles dickens" or "based on charles dickens" then I am very unhappy, especially if that "search" was actually clicking the blue highlight link under the specific volume of dickens I just read. I asked an Amazonian about this once, and they said the algo worked for them in sales, because enough people go to the "in the style of" or actually want that and so I am SOL. You would think there could be a search setting "specific author name == author, no extras" or something, if they wanted to maximise utility and choice.
• qiqitori 29d ago
  IIRC this was talked about in Cory Doctorow's Enshittification book. Here's my bookmarklet to get rid of sponsored results, it's survived a couple years: javascript:document.querySelectorAll(".s-result-item:has(.puis-sponsored-label-text)").forEach(function(e){ e.remove()})
• bvc_fuji 29d ago
  I think the point of this piece is that advertising ruins platforms. Maybe so but Amazon is hardly the first platform to be ruined by it. The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus. Subway platforms are filled with ads and force us to think about upcoming sales and broadway shows. Television is full of ads and makes us think about all kinds of things we don't care about. Restaurant menus advertise the items at the top of the menu to the detriment of the items in small print down below. Memes of all kinds live or die by their attention fitness. If a book, play, or video game fails to get enough attention it dies, goes out of print, never makes it to broadway, and never gets ported to the new system. So if there is a way to cheat the attention system by paying a little money to push the thing in front of a few more eyeballs, makers and publishers are gonna do it. Advertising is fundamentally un democratic because it assumes an imbalance of power - the power of those who control the publishing, the power those who can pay more.
  • css_apologist 29d ago
    > The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus. this is really bad comparison a subway platform ad doesn't dictate the way consumers use the subway. a restaurant does not monitor the effectiveness of the ads in their menus, analyse their industry and rip off their product with an in-house brand (amazon basics) amazon is not a marketplace, it is a surveillance platform built to allow amazon to take ownership of more and more markets to say this is just a problem with ads is defeatist instead getting real tangible change
• notatoad 29d ago
  if your highest performing ad is against searches for literally the title of your book, isn't that a signal that you don't need to buy ads? people are searching for your book. they will buy it whether you advertise or not. so why by the ad? this is framed as amazon doing something wrong, but it sounds like what's actually happening is that his marketer is wasting money. of course amazon is going to accept money if you give it to them for the things they're already doing for free. why shouldn't they?
• 33MHz-i486 29d ago
  Amazon’s decision making is beholden to growing its share price and the trite careerist ambitions of (8 reports per manager) ^ (5 layers of management) = ~32768 middle managers. It’s destined to become a cesspool for consumers. The only question is whether there will be any other options left by the time most people realize.
• mw888 29d ago
  Paraphrasing: > Advertisement serves to increase purchase of the inferior product. > The best product, which previously didn't require ads [on Amazon] now must pay Amazon to compete for eyeballs. Advertisement, when successful, increases the purchasing of any product, generally. That the best product is subject to this effect and competition has nothing to do with Amazon or technology.
• msy 29d ago
  This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.
  • seedless-sensat 29d ago
    It was only 600 words. I understand there is a push against AI bloated slop here, but I don't think we should discourage good prose. I just wanted to share that I find Seth's daily blog consistently excellent.
    • Matumio 29d ago
      Yes. I paused reading at some point just to marvel at the clarity of writing. It seems absurd to complain about length, it isn't long. Maybe we have different ideas what good writing is, but I'd say this is in the top percent. AI can mirror this style of writing, but it can't mirror the clarity of thought behind it.
    • wavemode 28d ago
      I don't think parent commenter is complaining about the length. "a lot of words to describe..." is a rhetorical device. Their comment is basically saying "you wrote this whole article complaining about Amazon, but what they're doing is common and systemic."
  • applicative 29d ago
    There is no rent seeking or monopolistic or technofeudal or enshittifying aspect of Amazon at all. The people who made their names beginning twenty years ago by marketing these expressions are losers who have simply been proven wrong. It is monotonous middle brow repetition See eg the left wing expose of the above mentioned brain death in Maher Aquanno https://archive.ph/YJaZr https://archive.ph/YJaZr better in their academic papers like Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/04866134261415639 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/04866134261415639
• dools 29d ago
  Don’t supermarkets allow companies to pay for shelf position? They also allow companies to do paid promotional sales activations renting floor space. It doesn’t seem all that egregious to me.
  • inigyou 29d ago
    They do, and it's egregious. Why doesn't the supermarket just raise the price on its own? If it thinks X brand sugar can be sold for $4.50 and the supermarket should pocket $1.50 of that, why not just do that instead of doing all the weird accounting tricks?
• ulrikrasmussen 29d ago
  I see the exact same thing on Play Store, and I think Google is outright complicit in fraud. The top result when you search for an app, even if by exact name, is always, literally 100% of the time, not the app you are looking for, but some other ad-infested knockoff spyware shit whose developer paid Google to be placed before the real thing.
  • dybber 29d ago
    Same on iOS App Store. Search for “pocket cast” and you see “Pocket FM”. Search for “notion” and you will see “Notix: AI note taker”.
  • tapland 29d ago
    I saw a google authenticator copy (using the old icon but named Authenticator) about two weeks ago. It was the top result but an ad and not by Google. Sad I didn't screenshot it, couldn't find it when searching Google Authenticator again.
    • qwertytyyuu 29d ago
      It annoys me so much that every authenticator is just called authenicator these, days. like its google authenicator, or microsoft authenicator, not just authenticator
    • ulrikrasmussen 29d ago
      Yes, theres a similar one for Microsoft Authenticator which obviously tries to con you into installing it by also advertising that it allows you to "sign in to your Microsoft accounts".
    • tdeck 28d ago
      Remember Google needs to prevent sideloading for your own good, despite the fact that they can't / won't even keep this out of the Play store.
      • LordDragonfang 28d ago
• Steering 29d ago
  Advertising may introduce a stranger. But charging a merchant to meet his own customer is highway robbery with a receipt.
  • spyckie2 29d ago
    lol a customer literally types in “Seth Godin” on the internet and gets to the product. But for some reason Amazon sponsored ads is a toll booth BLOCKING the merchant from meeting the customer unless the merchant pays 1 dollar??? How exactly is Amazon preventing the customer from meeting the merchant? What is the precise mechanism?
• spyckie2 29d ago
  Respectfully, this is nonsense. The consumer experience I have is that Amazon sells products at lower prices with better quality, support, variety and transparency than pretty much every other store out there. Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience. If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t? Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there. Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel. Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.
• andsoitis 29d ago
  > When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. They’re entitled? By whose standards are “best air fryer” to be determined? Do all buyers have the same criteria for what “best” means to them?
• vincnetas 29d ago
  First you create the value, then you capture it...
• cirelli94 29d ago
  I can see a simple solution to this problem. STOP BUYING FROM AMAZON! I do, you can too.
• shevy-java 29d ago
  This is why we must kill ads. Ads fund evil - be it Google, Amazon, you name it.
• ndkap 29d ago
  This also happens in physical stores. In Walmart and others, good quality and good price items are at hard to find, let alone notice places. That happens because lower quality more expensive products pay Walmart for better placement.
• _ink_ 29d ago
  > Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve. I am always surprised that people apparently think corporations want the best for their customers. They want the best for their shareholders. Sometimes the latter overlaps with the former, but mostly that's not the case.
• capr 28d ago
  > It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft. An economist would not read past this first sentence.
• DeusExMachina 28d ago
  I agree with the conclusions of the article, and I am no fan of Amazon or search ads on any product. However, I would like to play devil's advocate for a moment to brainstorm another issue. Let's say I build a product that is better than others in the market. We all agree that competition is good becuase it leads to better products and lower prices. However, the algorithm favors entrenched players. A product that has been bought many times and has positive reviews will be the first in the search results and people usually buy that. Which means I have no way to compete other than paying my way at the top of the list. I'm not stating this as the ultimate solution or even a good one. But I think it's worth to ask the question.
  • HappMacDonald 27d ago
    > Let's say I build a product that is better than others in the market. This sounds like the same song as Evolution: the winner is not "the best", the winner is "good enough" and dethroning "good enough" with "better" absolutely requires a sufficiently strong advantage, not just any incremental advantage. If the incumbent is not "good enough", then they won't get great reviews and whoever does try them will be looking for an alternative right away, so you have your foot in the door on either front. If the incumbent is good enough, then you just cannot market "being very slightly better": you target a demand that is not already sated. You could be cheaper.. by a large enough delta and without sufficient loss in quality to drive away demand, or you could begin by targeting whatever portion of the market is not satisfied by the incumbent for whatever reason. Marketing is hard (and harder still when one is aiming to be ethical and a good steward of the market instead of constantly scamming and cheating and ruining everyone's trust), and "paying to force your message in front of unsolicited eyeballs" is not the only game in town.
• floki165 28d ago
  [flagged]
• mbmbn 28d ago
  [dead]
• thelastgallon 28d ago
  According to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, cloud capital is a new type of physical and digital machinery—such as server farms, fiber-optic cables, and algorithms—that does not produce traditional goods. Instead, it shapes human behavior and extracts "cloud rent," which he argues has replaced traditional capitalism with a system of technofeudalism. Amazon, Google, FB, Apple, Microsoft have built monopolies to extract rents from everyone.
• throwawayffffas 28d ago
  > The ad system they built isn’t illegal I mean it could be. It could be construed as abusing market dominance in one sector (retail) to gain an unfair advantage in another (selling ads).
• markmiro 28d ago
  It’s not theft, it adds friction for their own customers who pay for Amazon Prime. I think it’s counterproductive over the long term. Secondly, taxes are not voluntary. You are required to pay them. Comparing government to business doesn’t make sense.
• sneak 28d ago
  > When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. No business is entitled to any customers.
• lee_ward 28d ago
  The Play Store doing the same thing tells you it's not an Amazon problem. Any platform with enough market share eventually prioritizes ad revenue over search quality.
• BrenBarn 27d ago
  Solution: break Amazon up into itty bitty pieces. A one-stop online shop for everything, automatic free shipping, automatically buying stuff you "need", many things that Amazon provides --- all of them are drugs from which we as a society must wean ourselves, even if the pains of withdrawal are great.
• thabulous 26d ago
  Seth Godin discovers advertising. Wait a second, companies can spend money to get more eyes on their product?!?!? Do grocery stores do that? Surely not. Search engines? That’d be terrible!!!