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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

Amazon does this all the time with me. "You just buyed a headset, do you want another one?" ... really? How many people buy multiple headsets in rapid succession? Hopefully, their engine will learn with time to differentiate between categories where you often buy many in rapid succession and categories where you only buy every few years, so this gets better. At the moment, it is completely useless.

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Well, I bought a headset for home, liked it, then bought an identical headset for the office. Someone else might like it and buy another for a friend. Probably their engine has found out that this is common enough for it to be worth recommending another headset rather than something else.

But why would I need a recommendation engine to show me ads for the thing I just bought, even in that scenario because I've got it in my hand and like it, so I'll just order another one like I did two days ago.

<shrug>

Buying something is the strongest marker of interest in a product. The fact that you bought it might be an invasion of privacy, but a strong indicator of interest in a product isn't, per se.

If you liked it, why do you need ads for alternatives?

They serve both the one you have been looking at and other ones. If you like it then it's one click to buy more. If you hate it, it's one click for an alternative...

As an advertiser, I could see this happening if you started looking at headphones on mobile, but purchased on desktop. Unless they are using a cookie onboarding service (I'd be mildly surprised if they weren't), they wouldn't have a great way to fire another tag for adding you to ask exclusion list for that product.

Of course ecomm audience management at their scale is super hard, but these are challenges most etailers face.

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