Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products
wsj.com
wsj.com
Obviously it's grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it's an improvement.
Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.
It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US/EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It's the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US/EU.
It's exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics), so not really rooting for their own name-brands either.
Amazon Basics must have had at least a couple of humans involved to agree getting it branded Amazon.
So basically Amazon's Choice locks are about the same as 95% of consumer locks on the market.
Isn't this just a property of most locks in general? I was under the impression that there are very few consumer locks that will stand up to someone with tools and a weekend of practice.
Everybody uses the same factories and Amazon doesn't have better quality control than anyone else.
My only complaint is I charge at 65W instead of 87, but it seems to only be slightly slower in practice.
But, it's also the nylon braided stuff, so it's probably built to different quality standards and by different people than the vanilla USB cables.
haven't had much luck with their Amazon Basics keyboards... went through 2 and then gave up and bought an IBM one...
That's pretty much what Monoprice does too -- it contracts out to Chinese manufacturers for it's products (sometimes copying existing products [1]), but their stuff is generally pretty decent quality.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/monoprice-a-tech-consumers-best-fr...
HN seems to have had an influx of incentivised accounts (via third-party services). They're putatively gaining some sort of credits. That's been discontinued at HN's request to at least some such services.
Best response is to flag the comments/posts, and if you see egregious abuse, email the mods: hn@ycombinator.com
(I've emailed re: the earlier thread.)
It's an ancedote sure, but back in 2012, we shopped only at Amazon. Now they are no longer King.
I was attracted to Amazon only because of lower prices. That was it and now it is no longer the case. As soon as another big player steps up and offers lower prices and simple UI there won't be a need for me to shop on Amazon.
Living near a metro area, I can get items from Amazon items within 24-48 hours (with Prime). Sometimes it even arrives later the same day.
Plus the whole free shipping (as long as you're Prime) thing..
I do agree that fast shipping is a big part of amazon but I think another big player could match the processing speed.
I wanted to get a sweater shaver. Amazon had it for 22. I bought a NIB one from Ebay for $12.
As far as I am concerned, the only thing Amazon has going for it right now is that it is a a one stop shop. That's worth something… how much? I'm not sure, but I know I'm buying a hell of a lot less stuff from Amazon now than 2 years ago.
Also you knew it was Genuine. I'd love Amazon to do a "Guaranteed Genuine" label or something, but I can see why they don't. I used to buy everything on Amazon, now I only buy stuff that I'm willing to accept might be counterfeit.
Nevertheless, it remains questionable how this change would be a fair competition for Amazon sellers, not just the Alibaba private label sellers but also all the sellers with popular products.
Really the rule should simply be that if you operate a market place you can't sell on it. Full stop. Then we could simply be happy that amazon is finally improving it's search and/or the quality of its listings.
Last time I checked there was a ocean of e-commerce stores on the internet all selling the same stuff
Disclaimer: ex-Amazon employee.
[1] OT: I wondered why it is "commingling" instead of "comingling" (like "cohabitation"), or "colmingling" (like "collaboration"), "conmingling" (like "concur"), or "cormingling" (like "correlation"), so looked up the rule.
The com-, co-, col-, con-, and cor- prefixes all mean "together". Which is used generally follows this rule: "Com- is used before b, m, p, also occasionally before vowels and f. The following variant forms occur: co- especially before vowels, h, and gn; col- before l; cor- before r; and con- before other consonants". See https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/com-
com-
word-forming element usually meaning "with, together," from Latin com, archaic form of classical Latin cum "together, together with, in combination," from PIE *kom- "beside, near, by, with" (compare Old English ge-, German ge-). The prefix in Latin sometimes was used as an intensive.
Before vowels and aspirates, it is reduced to co-; before -g-, it is assimilated to cog- or con-; before -l-, assimilated to col-; before -r-, assimilated to cor-; before -c-, -d-, -j-, -n-, -q-, -s-, -t-, and -v-, it is assimilated to con-, which was so frequent that it often was used as the normal form.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2019/03/07/amazon-v...
That's jerky.
This was a review for their TV Cube. I was trying to buy something with good voice control to allow a paralyzed person to browse YouTube, and TV Cube could not do it (maybe it will be better in the future..).
I suspect the only reason I got the call is that TV Cube is in active development.
That said, I’m not sure a third party seller can get my contact info as easily as Amazon can, so that part seems a bit unfair.
Hope this helps.
The TV Cube is almost there, the problem was that the voice commands are not built into its OS, instead each app has to implement them and the YouTube app didn't. It means the voice commands only work well with the Amazon native apps.
Voice is really in an abysmal state on all platforms. Pretend you can't touch anything, then read this for the fun:
https://www.techhive.com/article/3373853/how-to-use-roku-voi...
For appliances, you have the usual problem of not being able to accept terms to use institutional WiFi (lack of a good web browser).
Also for computers with a screen in front of your face, there already is a better solution: eye tracking.
But there is an annoying secondary problem with YouTube on a laptop: I can't lend my YouTube Red account (for an ad-free experience) to someone without also being fully logged into Google (they would have access to my email). With something like YouTube on Roku, this does not matter since you are only logged into only a single app. Google does have a family plan, but it's not cheap.
If you view vendors on the platform as existing to serve the users (as I do), the contradiction evaporates. If you view users as existing to serve the vendors, then it’s possible.
I get that US culture is heavy on "the customer is always right"[1], etc. but two-sided markets don't exist without recognizing both sides.
[1] In reality, that ends up being more of an employee control mechanism than a dedication to customers, but that's a different topic.
Here in Australia AliExpress feels like Amazon with faster shipping and more honesty.
Although Amazon now has an Australian entity, though I’m not sure how popular it is, maybe as (non-) popular as Amazon...
I canceled prime some time ago, because I realized I was getting significantly lower quality products than Walmart. Its become a junk store.
Has anyone done any analysis on the HN posting dataset to see if that happens to be the case?
And if that is the case, does anyone have any insight into why that might be?
Now they're wavering on all three of those fronts, and I guess that fact really bothers most of us
They used to usually have the best prices on the products they had, and the widest selection of products. They didn't always have the best quality products (which were sometimes exclusive to non-Amazon channels), and outside of return policy (which was very generous, probably specifically to cover all the other glitches) their service was nothing special at its best.
Let's not view past Amazon through rose-colored glasses.
It is possibly that most HN users purchase a lot via Amazon?
Is it a small but vocal group of HN users that have a grudge because they had an unsuccessful drop shipping operation that was harmed via Amazon?
Is there some competitor(ie. Walmart) that is trying to push an agenda?
It just seems high compared to other services, so I'm curious into additional insight into why Amazon, specifically, has this pattern when other services with issues do not.
I personally feel like it may just be that most HN users are, or were, heavy purchasers from Amazon. But I'm just looking to see if maybe there is a more insightful take on things.
I mean, I prefer AmazonBasics products because I've been burned enough times (occasionally literally) by cheap off-brand "Chinesium" goods.
So putting them at the top of the search suits me.
I ask because I'm unclear if shared SKU is a physical thing, a logical implementation detail, or some mix.
Is there a bin full of white 3' USB cables of the same type, regardless of supplier?
I had the impression that fulfillment centers weren't organized by product. Everything is everywhere. The robots retrieve the bins of whatever from wherever for the pickers to grab from. If this is mostly true, I'm not clear how similar white 3' USB cables get commingled.
This is my understanding, yes. If something is "fulfilled by amazon" common stock has one bin/location and is not differentiated.
Example: Last week two symbol barcode scanners used in the erp system died. I look up the same model on newegg and see that sold and shipped by newegg it was about $120. Amazon had multiple listing in the $60 range and checking reviews I see things like "died in two weeks", FAKE, "died and returned to symbol only for them to say it was a fake and they were refused service or replacement". How do you build trust with shenanigans like that? No thanks, Newegg got my money.
Amazon seems to be playing oblivious to all this mainly because people are STILL using them. So as long as they are making money they can afford to lose a few "picky" customers here and there. The rest are happy to buy trash because they save a buck. Capitalism at its finest.
As soon as Newegg starts mingling stock like Amazon does, then we'll have to go back to big box retailers to ensure we're getting the item we're paying for.
Since around then Newegg has been garbage, and continues to become worse.
I think any seller like amazon or newegg that turns into a marketplace/platform is trading their reputation for the potential of a cut from a much larger market, and they probably do this knowingly.
I’ve to keep my guard up when ordering from Amazon. It’s no longer the easy convenient and cheap option.
(1) US market is largest "single-language * consumer spending" market, so almost everyone outside of US/UK market puts effort in US first.
(2) USPS/UPU offers nearly 0-cost shipping for China to US. Can you ship a 2oz packet from China to the UK for under $1?
Why the heck does the ordering window have 2 or 3 “Confirm” boxes that I have to press?
And if I haven’t, why can’t it just tell me what’s not confirmed when I hit “Submit Order”?
Amazon pushing its own products drive 3rd-party resellers out of business and eventually, no other choices for consumers.
Aliexpress - always been a Russian roulette.
Coincidentally, Amazon brand products are usually pretty good in my experience, so this might not be a terrible outcome for users who have already decided to come shop at Amazon's store.
There was a planet money episode about this exact comparison the other day. Basically it comes down to:
When a grocery store puts something on it's shelves, the store itself bought it from the manufacturer. They have already made their money. On Amazon, manufacturers don't make money when the item is listed, they make it only if and when a customer buys the product.
When a grocery store makes its own novel product and puts it on the shelf, it's taking a risk. If they make those products, but they don't sell, they just lost a bunch of money. Or, if their product is a competing one with an existing product, they know that products like that can sell, but now they have to focus on outselling the original product. When Amazon makes its own product, most of the risk has been removed. They pretty much already know it sells well on their platform, and they have enough money that knocking 5 dollars off the price, making it prime recommended, and putting it at the top of the list will cause it to beat the competition 9 times out of 10.
I'm not saying any of this is fair or unfair, because I'm not an economist so I don't believe I have a full understanding of the situation.
I tried to find the exact episode but it seems I can never find them when I need them.
It's way more complicated than that. Manufacturers pay stores to carry their products, feature their products in special places in stores, get forced to take buy back unsold product, get paid way later on invoices, etc etc.
Amazon is not leasing retail floor space, so to GP's point, any comparisons between Amazon's open platform and traditional physical retail spaces are moot.
That's not how it works for a some perishable products in grocery stores. For example, bread is stocked daily by the bakeries themselves. Same thing with potato chips.
If a grocery store has their in house bakery up front right when you walk in selling bread, and the vendors bread is all the way in the back, is that unfair to the vendor?
That would be for the vendor to decide when planning out where to sell their product I guess
The store still buys those items from them. Some bigger stores will force the vendor to offer a buyback guarantee, but while the product is on their shelves, the store owns them.
If it is shipped & sold by Amazon, Amazon already paid for it from their supplier. If it is shipped & sold by SomeOtherStore, generally they bought it already from someone. There are a lot of dropshippers also and that is a different story.
Amazon similarly protects itself with onerous contracts that can force suppliers to eat the cost of unsold products at times, and does whatever it can to avoid buying unproven products.
Grocery stores and other retailers in general can be protected by refund policies and buyback policies so they are not necessarily taking as much risk especially on packaged products with long expiry dates. They can also liquidate stuff that doesn't get purchased to recoup some money.
The grocery store's risk on store branded products is about the same as Amazon's risk for Amazon brand products. They have the data to know what sells and what doesn't, they have control of the store layout, and they also have pricing data. There's really no major differentiation besides the physical store front and how manufacturers "rent" space.
On Amazon there are as many shelves as there are product categories and the thing has much much more fluctuation.
What that means is, that a "promoted" product is sometimes the only one which stays at a fixed spot, while all all the others are to be found on the miscellaneous-pile.
It’s unfair.
A better analogy would be a walmart in a small town hosting a bunch of small business to showcase their products, then kicking out the top sellers and replacing them with a store brand version. You could argue that those producers should just open their own store but most people won't go out of their way to a different store to buy paper towels.
Amazon is more like shopping mall that decides to start operating their own stores and competing with their tenants.
I think the problem is that they present the results on good faith that "these results are the best match for you based on your search", not the most profitable for them.
I just ran a search and the default search filter was "Featured", which is so ambiguous it could mean anything, so it seems like a classic bait and switch that played out over the course of a decade of consumers getting the best search results based on reviews and sales.
That’s not true though right? Don’t grocery stores buy the products that are on their shelves and they are reselling them? That’s fundamentally different from a marketplace.
No, not usually. Usually the seller pays the grocery to carry items, and the seller owns the items until sold.
For some products the seller even stocks the items on the shelves.
That said, what brands got that special treatment was very much decided by Publix, so they were still curating the selection, they just weren't paying up-front for the goods or responsible for keeping those shelves looking good.
That was the original point I was arguing against.
My point is that grocery store is not a good analogy because Amazon is not the same as a retail store, they are a combination store and marketplace.
To be fair, I think I would be more comfortable comparing Amazon to Sears in it's heyday.
I'm not trying to defend Amazon, but I don't think that comparison makes sense.
>Amazon gives you distribution, traffic, logistics, etc, with zero risk.
Not everyone uses the distribution, and a mall or flea market also provides traffic to tenants.
If amazon does charge a fee for simply listing a product, tell us. They don’t as far as I know.
Amazon is totally within their right imo, those sellers can go back to eBay if they dislike amazon.
more like a big box store that allows other stores to operate in them so long as they get a cut.
Amazon does all of these things. They have unlimited shelf space, which reduces constraints.
But vendors can have amazon handle returns, they can be kicked off the platform, and amazon decided how to present vendors.
So it's fine they're shafting other vendors on their platform because their products are good?
I am frustrated by plenty of things that Amazon does, by the way...I just don't think that this is a particularly bad feature of theirs.
They own the store. Shopify is a thing.
After a certain size, they should be regulated as public utilities. So many companies completely depend on Amazon's platform for their business and they're all easy prey for the behemoth.
I did some work for a company that sells batteries on Amazon. A simple dispute got them suspended across the board. A decision made by a third rate employee from god knows where, probably without even a cursory reading of the case, made in a split second, brought down a company with 10 years in the market and hundreds of employees.
No due process, no rights, nothing. You can't defend yourself, they just shut you down and then you have to beg for weeks to be let back in. After weeks and hundreds of thousands in losses, you have no legal recourse against a wrongful suspension.
You can make the argument that they could just set up their own online store for the batteries and you're right, they can. But amazon and ebay are so big that its practically impossible to sell these things at scale without them. Its not a fair game and this is but one of the issues.
They definitely need to be treated as public utilities after a certain amount of users.
They do. Amazon accounts for about 47% of online retail. The rest is divided up among a bunch of other sites.
In the UK there's a company called Argos that worked ENTIRELY as a catalog store. Their physical locations were basically a warehouse with a lobby that had the catalogs and computers where you could look items up and order them. THEY should be a major competitor to Amazon... but according to my UK friends, they're not.
They missed the internet and when they tried to get into it, they just failed at every turn.
It's the same story as when Sears rose to prominence: they saw a business model the other mail-order retailers didn't understand.
The irony is Sears started as a mail-order catalog but couldn't get back to the old model in time. But of course their large management structures couldn't move as fast as small company with somebody like Bezos at the helm who could just make calls on the spot.
The ONLY advantage I have is that my titles are more promoted by Amazon in the search results (since they make a killing off the higher margins, even when they decide to discount it themselves). If Amazon wasn't boosting KDP self-published titles in the search results, it wouldn't work... period, in my opinion. I wouldn't even try.
And if anyone from Amazon is reading this, you guys should allow the authors to purchase the title in bulk at a much cheaper rate, so that reselling to local bookstores is a viable option.
Similar if you’re a retailer.
This is why Shopify’s new model is better for D2C and retail (but very difficult for them to pull off).
If Microsoft can get hammered for packaging Internet Explorer with Windows (and probably rightly so, given the market conditions at the time), there is a direct analogy to be made here.
Pick what you want to be: if you want to be the greatest goods index and shipment company in the world, fantastic. But you have to accept that you cannot sneak some of your own other-products to the top using that power. In this case, spin off your Kindle etc companies or have them broken up.
At this point, I'd literally rather drive over to a physical store than try to decipher whether I'm getting crap from them, and whether that crap is coming on a slow boat from the orient, every, single time I try to buy something. The future is CURATION. That's what the physical store does for me, by nature of the fact that their shelf space is limited. Amazon would be wise to throw 90% of the items off their platform, and stop being a storefront for every jerk with a computer and some junk lying around. Leave that crap for Ebay!
They've simply nailed it and scaled it. In New Zealand a company called TradeMe got there first and successfully fended off Amazon, but that's a minority case.
There are pros (e.g. consumers love it) and cons (e.g. human toll when optimising efficiency without robots) to having Amazon dominate in whatever country, but you can't deny, they get the job done. There isn't really another company competing with them at that level, is there? And that's why I think it's an effective monopoly.
To abuse this wide-reaching power, in making your own stuff rise to the top of world sales, is absolutely a concern and we should honestly be grateful that there are laws and funded agencies giving a shit about this.
For some reason, the browser bundling is what stuck to the public consciousness.
Huh, that's an interesting reaction.
It’s actually a pretty understudied microeconomics case
https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2017/07/04/optimizing...
If you go into a candy store where the owner also makes their own brand of candy, what do you think will be the most prominent item on the shelf?
Amazon isn't exposed to the same risks in a lot of product listings.
While I can't say for sure that their algorithms are always spot on, they give some interesting feedback in terms of recent review count history, price history, whether Amazon has recently bulk deleted reviews, and some heuristic comment quality ratings. So often I've found that Amazon's Choice is questionable: 4.8 stars, hundreds of reviews within the last 30 days on a slickly packaged, no-name electronics gadget is all too common.
Typically, I use Fakespot to look for red flags, flip back to the reviews area on Amazon, sort them by Most Recent Reviews, and dig around. I don't use the Fakespot Chrome extension, though. Too invasive for my tastes.
Floveme? Tendam? Donse? Spigen? and my favorite: Vapesoon.
Is it just too early for the legit brands to have a case ready? Or am I doing it wrong?
If I have one file on my computer named "Amazon Search Sucks ASS.txt" and I search for it by name, in quotes, I expect to see only one result.
A similar search on amazon will return a bunch of results many of them have nothing to do with the words I typed, not in the title, description, etc.
DON'T GET ME STARTED ON SORTING BASED ON PRICE!!! The number of search results should not change based on how you sort the result list!!!
Bezoz should just stick to sexting...
Edit: I'll add that I'm not saying it isn't an anti-competitive practice, I'm sure it is. But I am saying that it's a bit silly to insinuate that stores don't already advertise for their own goods.
Everywhere else requires me to convert coin into USD and then buy things, which sucks.
Google prioritizes certain websites/results when I enter queries too, it doesn't mean I'm required to click on them.
What ever happened to people spending a few extra minutes looking for the result they want? If the first few aren't correct for you then move on. Unless you're spending an extra 30+ minutes because the search doesn't work correctly at all then there's no issue here.
I would like to call this "an appeal to free will". It's true that individuals can choose what they click, but there is also going to be a statistical reality of what people "choose" to click more/most often.
Because of this, imo the big deal is absolutely gargantuan. Google for example handles several billions of searches per day. To your point of continuing to hunt for the right results, just adding a few seconds per search increases the amount of aggregate time spent searching on a scale of centuries per day. I would argue it's a similar case with Amazon; the service is so large that a minute changes can have tremendous impacts.
Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Maximized Its Profits
In other words, no news here really.
Shareholders come first. The customers (who are presumedly happier getting better prices) come next. Finally, last comes Amazon's vendors.
In other words, no news here really.
Perhaps the follow up could be:
WSJ Use Clickbait Headlines to Boost Its Own Agenda And Ad Revenues
Selling physical goods is a three part process - manufacturing, marketing, and selling. At each part of the process, you have to know what helps you stand out.
Manufacturing - is there something that enables you to manufacturer a product that can’t easily be copied or that allows you to create the product cheaper than competitors?
Marketing - are you depending on SEO and Google ads just like all of your competitors?
Selling - Are you depending on Amazon just like all of your competitors?
You have to be able to optimize on at least one of those areas or you’re going to find yourself competing on price at either slim, no or negative margins or being lost in a marketplace where everyone is doing the same thing.
I can't even count the number of times I have searched for Product-X, by lowest price, and encountered a dozen pages of Clearly-Not-X and Actually-Just-An-Accessory-For-X before even reaching the first X.
Or Item-Sold-By-Weight-Y, that comes in 30 different package sizes, none of which is tagged with comparable unit prices. If you want some Y, you cannot order your search by $/kg or $/L. And sometimes it's difficult to figure out exactly how much Y you would be getting. The giant barrel of industrial generic will be listed next to the 20 oz bottle of gold-plated spiritual-grade Woo-Woo brand.
I don't mind that Apple runs an App Store. I mind that they have an unfair advantage over their competition.
I don't mind that Google reams advertisers. I mind that they sit on both sides of the brokerage, thereby taking advantage of their own clients.
It's like the "firewall" between financial advisors and investment ratings for those bankers. That crap needs to be kept separate, to prevent perverse incentives, self-dealing, conflicts of interest, fraud, unfair advantages, etc.
Why is this not an antitrust case? Amazon has the monopoly on online retail I assume, so isn't ranking it's own products higher an antitrust violation?
But I guess that’s how supermarkets are too. I buy Krogers brands because I know they'll be vetted and meet a certain bar. If I don’t like it, I can always return it for a refund.
It’s not great for competition and Amazon can easily boost crappy cheap products.
Amazon is a massive beast. What is the alternative with better experience ?
While the graph towards the end of the article indicates Amazon captures ~35% of online retail in the US
What a disingenuous way for Amazon to communicate - I hope the people their original quote was directed to saw right through this.
If I'm looking for something on Amazon I use Google and the "site:" prefix, and use the meta returned by Google's search engines to find what I'm after.
The value of Amazon to me, is similar to Steam. Amazon's influence of product reviews is more concerning to me, anyway.
A company wants to maximize its profit.
If it is wasn't that way, they would be acting illegaly.
(publicly trading company must seek shareholders profit)
So what is the news once again?
Common misconception.
> Corporate directors are not required to maximize shareholder value.
https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
"Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors."
I wonder in what was they tweaked it so that the lawyers approved this change? I wonder if regulators will care if it skirts the letter of that law when the intention was to attempt to sneak by oversight by the FTC and the DOJ?
They changed their approach to instead measure how much profit Amazon makes on a given search. This allows them to analyze whether various changes to the search algorithm increase or decrease profit, and optimize for those that do.
It's a subtle distinction but it means that instead of explicitly promoting their products in search, they are instead making changes based on other product attributes that naturally boost the ranking of their products (and thus increase their profits).
It's kind of like a blind study: they're telling the engineers, "we won't tell you which products are ours, but we'll see if you can figure it out based on these 100 other traits."
The rest is pretty much garbage.
"Amazon’s lawyers rejected the overt addition of contribution profit into the algorithm...
They turned to the metrics Amazon uses to test the algorithm’s success in reaching certain business objectives, said the people who worked on the project.
When engineers test new variables in the algorithm, Amazon gauges the results against a handful of metrics. Among these metrics: unit sales of listings and the dollar value of orders for listings. Positive results for the metrics correlated with high customer satisfaction and helped determine the ranking of listings a search presented to the customer.
Now, engineers would need to consider another metric—improving profitability—said the people who worked on the project. Variables added to the algorithm would essentially become what one of these people called “proxies” for profit: The variables would correlate with improved profitability for Amazon, but an outside observer might not be able to tell that. The variables could also inherently be good for the customer."
Tldr: some people in Amazon wanted to give a boost to Amazon-products. The search team fought them vociferously and refused to budge. The lawyers came out against it as well. Amazon's internal A/B testing framework measures a number of metrics, including both revenue and profit, when determining whether a specific feature/change should be deployed.
The fact that the A/B testing framework measures the profit impact of any change, is hardly earth shattering. This is one of the core features that any A/B testing framework attempts to accomplish.
This also doesn't tell you anything about what the search algorithm is actually doing. An A/B testing framework can only help you evaluate the relative effectiveness of different algorithms. It doesn't actually create/influence the algorithm in any way. As WSJ themselves reported, Amazon's search algorithm does not take profitability as an input.
WSJ has done a fantastic job in unearthing this very interesting internal-debate that's happening in Amazon. But they have reported it in a way that is very misleading and gives laypeople the impression that they have a smoking gun. In reality, the only thing they have produced is the fact that Amazon's A/B testing framework is profit-aware.
World gets better.
Also some alliances like Target + Shipt are nipping at their heels with same day delivery. https://www.target.com/c/shipt/-/N-t4bob
> Amazon has adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company
Unthinkable. A store trying to make a profit selling things. How crazy.
I am curious if there actually are any laws relevant to this situation. As far as I can tell, this is exactly like Walmart or BigBoxCo pushing their own brands. It's not illegal and, generally, it's not even a bad thing for the consumer (in the short term).
It really feels like most of the people taking issue with this are doing so because of their personal sentiments rather than legality.
At one point when coffee wasn’t a big section, the category captain of coffee actually helped bring in competitors to increase the overall size of the shelf space and thus attract more passing customers.
If this was you or I, there wouldn't be a problem. If you are the only / pretty much the only store used then it (to me) would clearly be a problem for consumers. You'd be using your monopoly in one area (marketplace) to benefit you elsewhere (selling USB cables) rather than competing on a level playing field.
In between it becomes trickier. At what point are they too big? How dominant would they need to be?
I think there are differences to physical stores partly due to scale. If a shelf has 10 different variations of basically the same thing that's the equivalent of all products being on the front of the search results. If there are hundreds, then the ranking becomes vital.
Downvotes for bad information, not snark
Two not-entirely-random examples of similar behaviour:
Supermarkets place their own brand merchandise where they feel it'll sell best. Undeniably good business, and certainly no reason for concern.
Perhaps more questionably, but bare with me - Google place AMP content, which is to say content they have made their product by merit of some ToS/caching slight of hand, front and center. Is it exactly the same as what Amazon are doing? Well, no. Is it placing content they want consumed above other content irrespective of merit or consumer benefit? Probably.
Similarly Amazon are doing what businesses do and promoting their most profitable products, straddling both the above examples. Whether it's best for the customers is open to debate, but it doesn't change that it's entirety their prerogative.
* kitchen
* wash
* garage
—-
Basically, id like to setup a standard or select a standard product lineup and say “refill my kitchen”
“Refill my bathroom set”
“Refill my washing supplies”
Etc...
And you could see the averaged products used to supply each area of the home...
This goes in line with a previous YC application i had submitted which was called “standard pantry”
The idea was that a pantry cabinet would be delivered to you, with ingredients and recipes on how to make various healthy dishes based on the whole pantry of ingredients. The goal being to raise nutritional health, especially among lower income.
And with a smart pantry it would give you recipe ideasbased on what you have and know what ingredients you lack and auto order
Like a netflix for healthy food...
YC hated it...